Infrastructural Participation in Digital Societies

Challenges and Alternatives

Abstract

User and citizen participation in the form of micro-actions scripted by digital systems has become indispensable to the functioning of government and society. In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘infrastructural participation’ to evaluate this phenomenon and investigate empirical instances of it in four topical areas: automated vehicles, digital education, citizen science and data protection. We formulate four societal challenges arising from infrastructural participation: 1) the resourcification of engagement, whereby digital participation becomes a mechanism for extracting people’s data, work and attention to serve as resources for value generation by industry and state, 2) growing infrastructural dependency of the public sector on the private sector, 3) the ‘infra-structuring’ of persons - i.e. asymmetric, interactive categorisation - by digital technology, and 4) knowledge deficits and power asymmetries. We also identify an alternative form of infrastructural participation that has potential to empower social actors and strengthen relations between innovation and society, namely ‘epistemic participation’ by non-experts in governance, innovation and research. To conclude, we call for the development of society-centric approaches to digital participation to address the above challenges and realise potential benefits.