Covid-19: When Species and Data Meet
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Covid-19: When Species and Data Meet Catherine Price 1 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article explores how species meet, in particular humans and the Covid-19 virus. It also draws attention to the digital world through the lens of contact-tracing apps. Here, I examine human-virus-data relations, with humans, Covid-19, and data meeting and intra-acting. This article examines what has led us to this situation with Covid-19 and the role data is currently playing. The article offers an answer to two questions. How do humans, Covid-19, and Covid-19 contact-tracing apps meet and intra-act? What are the social justice issues and problems associated with contact-tracing apps? This article examines how species meet and intra-act, as well as how the Anthropocene has contributed to the current situation. The article also discusses contact-tracing apps and what these apps mean for society. Finally, the article shows how entanglements are not only constrained to those which are multispecies but also stretch out to the digital. These postdigital hybrid assemblages enable the coming together of humans, biological-more-than-human-worlds, and the digital. Postdigital hybrid assemblages enable us to push beyond boundaries, helping us understand Covid-19 and its impacts on society. Hopefully, this discussion about the postdigital hybrid assemblage will contribute to discussions in the future, and long after Covid-19, about how we are living our lives, and who and what we are living our lives with. Keywords Covid-19 . Species meeting . More-than-human worlds . Data . Contact-tracing apps . Postdigital hybrid assemblage . Anthropocene
Introduction This article explores how species meet, in particular humans and the Covid-19 virus. It also draws attention to the postdigital world using digital contact-tracing apps as an example. Postdigital is understood here as ‘hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital
* Catherine Price [email protected]
1
School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
Postdigital Science and Education
and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational’ (Jandrić et al. 2018: 895). Digital contact-tracing uses a device such as a smartphone as a proxy for people. It measures the proximity between smartphones and then uses it as a proxy to determine the contact between two or more people (Ada Lovelace Institute 2020). Smartphones function through complex interactions between hardware (chips, processors, storage, and antennas), operating systems (Google [owners of Android] or Apple), app stores (Google or Apple), platforms (analytical companies who collect and analyse data, and social media companies), and apps (Privacy International 2020). With Covid-19, the data collected by smartphones is analysed by a risk-scoring algorithm to determine whether a user or the public health authorities should be contacted if a user has come into contact with a person with Covid-19. The use of this technology by
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