<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social distancing measures as the Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the drive to large-scale digitalisation. This rapid digitalisation enhances the already ongoing process of datafication, namely turning ever-increasing aspects of our identities, practices, and societal structures into data. Through an analysis of empirical examples of datafication in three important areas of the welfare state – employment services, public service media, and the corrections sector – we draw attention to some of the inherent problems of datafication in the Nordic welfare states. The analysis throws critical light on automated decision-making processes and illustrates how the ideology of dataism has become increasingly entangled with welfare provision. We end the article with a call to develop specific measures and policies to enable the development of the data welfare state, with media and communication scholars playing a crucial role.</p>
</abstract>

Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social distancing measures as the Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the drive to large-scale digitalisation. This rapid digitalisation enhances the already ongoing process of datafication, namely turning ever-increasing aspects of our identities, practices, and societal structures into data. Through an analysis of empirical examples of datafication in three important areas of the welfare state – employment services, public service media, and the corrections sector – we draw attention to some of the inherent problems of datafication in the Nordic welfare states. The analysis throws critical light on automated decision-making processes and illustrates how the ideology of dataism has become increasingly entangled with welfare provision. We end the article with a call to develop specific measures and policies to enable the development of the data welfare state, with media and communication scholars playing a crucial role.

Fostering the data welfare state: A Nordic perspective on datafication

Faculty of Information, Technology and Communication Sciences

Nordicom Review

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

{"article-title":"Fostering the data welfare state: A Nordic perspective on datafication"}

Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social...

Fostering the data welfare state: A Nordic perspective on datafication

Publié en ligne: 05 déc. 2021

Pages: 207 - 223

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0051

Mots clés
welfare state, dataism, datafication, data welfare state, automated predictions

© 2021 Rikke Andreassen et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Fostering the data welfare state: A Nordic perspective on datafication

Publié en ligne: 05 déc. 2021

Pages: 207 - 223

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0051

Mots cléswelfare state, dataism, datafication, data welfare state, automated predictions

© 2021 Rikke Andreassen et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mots clés
welfare state, dataism, datafication, data welfare state, automated predictions