Speaker: Renke Siems, Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg
With the popularization of the World Wide Web, the digital transformation began to convert more and more physical and social spaces into a software-based construct. With the development of the mobile Internet and after geopolitical turning points such as 9/11, this transformation turned out to be a datafication that was taking place on an ever-increasing scale: all social phenomena were transformed into data in order to be able to assign them new purposes and to monetize them.
Many aspects of this development have their origins in scientific infrastructures, which are increasingly transforming into a specialized platform economy, a GAFAM of curated information. As platform corporations, they are developing and exploiting a behavioral biometrics of academic life as a whole, which is only very slowly being countered by approaches to digital sovereignty in science.
As a result, researchers become transparent in ways previously unimaginable, but they are also confined within hierarchies. They are no longer the experimenters but the lab rats. Access to their research and its findings is also changing. Consequently, researchers are personally exposed to new risks, and their research is subject to new forms of information leakage.
