Datasphere
The datasphere is a multidisciplinary concept that first appeared in the 1980s. While many terms have been adopted to describe the digital world – terms such as the Internet, cyberspace, metaverse – the various concepts of the datasphere seem to address the growing dependency of human activities on data, as well as approach the digital world in a holistic manner. Related terms include data economy, data governance, data commons, and data management.
History of the term
The term "datasphere" has been used to broadly define digital space and information, particularly in relation to information flow, data, and digital platforms. Since the 1980s, the concept started to be used more and more. Since then, it has been applied to a variety of contexts ranging from product names, to conference titles, and terms of science fiction art.The 'datasphere' as a concept was popularized by the media theorist, writer and advocate of cyberpunk culture and open-source solutions to social problems, Douglas Rushkoff, in the 1980s. He approached the datasphere as the "circulatory system for today's information, ideas and images", understood as "our new natural environment". Rushkoff's conceptualization, centered in media theory, was deployed to explain how 'media viruses' – ideas that capture public attention – rapidly spread. As such, Rushkoff's datasphere invokes ideas of information flow, rather than being focused on structured data and its analysis.
Around the same time as Rushkoff's global datasphere concept was coined, others were writing of the 'personal datasphere' - drawing more upon the idea of a datasphere as a stock of data. The personal datasphere concept envisions multiple dataspheres each with their own center.
In 2004, a short paper by lawyer and cyber-defender Andrew Updegrove, introduced the concept of a "Personal Data Sphere". Updegrove conceptualizes the Personal Data Sphere, with a nod back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's 1925 concept of a 'Noosphere' "layer of consciousness surrounding the globe, comprising all human thought and culture". Updegrove's PDS resonates with contemporary concepts such as MiData, Vendor Relationship Management, and Personal Data Stores. His concept refers to personal digital data such as birth and death records, and parental estate planning documents.
In 2015, law professor, Stephen Humphreys, alludes to the idea of "living in the datasphere" in his article "Conscience in the datasphere" where he attempts to reframe the debate on privacy, law, and technology using the datasphere to communicate the public's immersion in data.
The term emerged again in 2015 when a group of doctors published their paper "The Project Data Sphere Initiative: Accelerating Cancer Research by Sharing Data" in The Oncologist journal. Acknowledging that cancer research can be advanced through access to historical data from clinical trials, the authors introduce the Data Sphere as a digital database which allows researchers to electronically share cancer clinical trial data.
In 2016, the term was also adopted in the medical arena. It was used to refer to domain specific 'data spaces', as in Jérôme Béranger's 'Big Data and Ethics: The Medical Datasphere'. Béranger brings to the table the use of digital information and the need to find a balance between confidentiality and transparency. The datasphere here reverses to the "massive data" and the ethical issues surrounding its design and manipulation, especially regarding personal data.
Bergé, Grumbach, and Zeno-Zencovich describe the datasphere as an emerging space, hosted primarily through digital platforms. They describe how:
This contains parallels with the idea of the Infosphere introduced by Luciano Floridi as "the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities, their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations". However, where Floridi's concept includes both digital and "offline and analog spaces of information" alongside digital data, the scope of the datasphere is more tightly defined, concerned primarily with digital representations of the world that have been "found, collected and organized".
Overall, the notion of the 'datasphere' is increasingly used and adopted to define the complex digital ecosystem we are currently navigating.
Contemporary uses of the datasphere
As a metaphor and as a complex system, the notion of 'datasphere' is approaching a highly complex digital ecosystem and, overall, addresses the question of the type of society we want to build.Datasphere as a spatial metaphor
The term 'datasphere' is used as a spatial metaphor. For instance, it was adopted by the GEODE Center, a research and training center that studies "the strategic and geopolitical issues of the digital revolution". The GEODE's objective is twofold. On one hand, it seeks to study the datasphere as a geopolitical "object in its own right". On the other hand, it uses the resources of the datasphere to conduct geopolitical analyses. As part of its research work, the Center has developed a cartography of the datasphere, where there is not only a focus on regional approaches to the digital space, data flows, logical and physical routes, and social networks, but also to the power distribution across geographies.Both Floridi and Bergé et al. see these new spheres as 'spaces we inhabit': architectures and ecosystems affecting the way daily life is lived. For Bergé in particular, the spatial metaphor of the datasphere highlights the way in which datafication reconfigures relations between "conventional institutional territories ", and "gives rise to new territories". For some authors, the idea of 'living in the datasphere' brings to mind the 'public sphere', and the 'Hobbes's bargain' through which public institutions are arguably grounded, albeit more shakily so as expansion of an unregulated datasphere undermines classical institutions authority and effectiveness.
As the datasphere seems to be more and more perceived as an ecosystem and space we inhabit, new collective data governance frameworks have also arisen across the globe. These frameworks might replicate some datasphere elements in their design systems. For example, new governance tools such as data commons, data trusts, cooperatives, collaboratives, data pools, among others can all be tools used to navigate the datasphere and do so collectively – thus enhancing its complexity –.
The datasphere could also be understood as a natural ecosystem. Just as it happens in nature – where energy flows and there is an ongoing cycle among ecosystems – the datasphere is an ecosystem where fast-paced and complex data flows. Governance efforts are nowadays focusing on leveraging free data flows while ensuring the protection of different human groups. As much as data flows naturally, innovative rules are needed to allow for the cycles to flow and guarantee that the environment as a whole and its sub-systems are protected.
The notion of datasphere is related to that of cyberspace, which describes a widespread interconnected digital technology. The datasphere encompasses the notion of cyberspace, while adding layers of complexity, namely human groups and norms. In addition, the datasphere does not only consider digital technologies, but the different data flows produced in a hyperconnected society.
Datasphere as a complex system
The datasphere, according to the Datasphere Initiative, was first conceptualized in the paper "We Need To Talk About Data: Framing the Debate Around the Free Flow of Data and Data Sovereignty" by Bertrand De La Chapelle and Lorrayne Porciuncula. The Datasphere Initiative has since coined the datasphere "as the complex system encompassing all types of data and their dynamic interactions with human groups and norms".This formula essentially draws attention to the mutually co-constituted nature of digital artifacts, constituencies and social relationships and rules and social expectations - and to the multiplicity of each. At the same time, it stops short of detailed specification of datasets, human groups or norms, and leaves open the question of how the interaction of these should be governed.
- Datasets: All digital data including personal and non-personal, private, and public as presented in datasets which are classified differently depending on sector, use-case, or agreed standard.
- Human groups: "Individuals and human groups of all sorts generate, collect, store, process, exchange, make accessible or access, analyze, and use data for various purposes."
- Norms: Cultural, legal, and technical norms "including high-level principles, international agreements, laws and regulatory frameworks, but also contracts, licenses or terms of service, and even code, standards, and software underpinning technical systems."
Just as it can be discussed of the atmosphere, and some local atmospheric conditions, it can be talked about the datasphere, and of how it is experienced quite differently in different spaces and settings: