[Commlist] Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society

We would like to announce a new publication from New York University 
Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Technologies of Speculation***

The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society

*Sun-ha Hong***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781479883066/technologies-of-speculation/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781479883066/technologies-of-speculation/>_**__*

*Receive a 20% discount online:*

*CSLS2020*

An inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms.

Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a 
broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, /Technologies of 
Speculation/reframes today’s major moral and political controversies 
around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss 
and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location 
data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new 
technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the 
black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the 
burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is 
stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and 
risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to 
track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in 
which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by 
data-driven systems.

 From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale 
dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone 
warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in 
new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong 
demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, 
and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data 
equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our 
fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated 
to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and 
other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the 
back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded 
into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.*__*

**

*Sun-ha Hong*is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser 
University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. 
Hong alayzes the fantasies, values, and sentimentalities surrounding big 
data and AI. More information can be found at his website, 
sunhahong.org.*__*


*New York University Press**| July 2020 | 288pp | 9781479883066 | PB | 
£23.99**

*Price subject to change.

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