Collective Strategies for Slow Computing

Digital technologies should be making life easier. And to a large degree they do, transforming everyday tasks of work, consumption, communication, travel and play. But they are also accelerating and fragmenting our lives affecting our well-being and exposing us to extensive data extraction and profiling that helps determine our life chances. Is it then possible to experience the benefits of computing, but to do so in a way that asserts individual and collective autonomy over our time and data? This talk seeks to answer this question by exploring collective strategies and actions to achieve slow computing, and the policy and legal interventions required, with the analysis framed within an ethics of digital care rooted in concepts of data justice and time and data sovereignty.

BIO: Rob Kitchin is a professor in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. He was a European Research Council Advanced Investigator on the Programmable City project (2013-2018) and a principal investigator on the Building City Dashboards project (2016-2020). He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 31 academic books (including Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World (2021), Slow Computing: Why We Need Balanced Digital Lives (2020), and The Right to the Smart City (2019), and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters. He has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geography, and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.