In the online era, every action a person takes leaves a digital footprint. Not only searches, purchases and location data but also the small and large behaviors of whom one connects with and what one talks about are recorded. These traces accumulate as data and become the basis on which companies, governments and various institutions classify and judge individuals. It is an age in which a person's life is turned into vast amounts of data, and that data in turn determines the person's standing.
The new book "The Ordinal Society" digs into the problems of a data-ruled age from the perspective of social theory. Author Marion Fourcade is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied economic sociology and questions of quantification. Co-author Kieran Healy is a professor of sociology at Duke University and a sociologist who has explored how social networks, data and quantification are reshaping modern society.
What is intriguing is that people are not merely passive victims who have their data taken from them. In exchange for using free search, email, social networking services and various platform services, they voluntarily hand over their digital information. The authors explain this by borrowing anthropologist Marcel Mauss's theory of "the gift." Users who receive convenient services as a gift hand over their data in return. In the authors' words, the capture of data resembles pickpocketing at a pleasant party more than a robbery at gunpoint.
The problem is that the data gathered this way does not stay still. Companies, governments and various organizations use it to classify people and assign them rankings. In credit, employment, insurance, health care, education and housing, which category a person is placed in and where they rank determines their opportunities and treatment. If earlier theories of the surveillance society asked "who is watching me," "The Ordinal Society" goes a step further and asks "where do those who have watched me place me with that information."
The authors propose the concept of "eigencapital" as a new form of capital in the 21st century. Digital traces become a kind of resource that characterizes an individual's social position and governs their opportunities and treatment. People with good scores and records obtain better terms and services, while those with low scores or who are poorly measured can be pushed to the margins of the system.
The trickier problem is that this ranking appears far more "fair" than the blatant discrimination of the past. People believe it is objective because individuals are evaluated by measuring their actual behavior and choices as data, rather than their origins or status. But the authors point out that gaps created by social structure also seep into individual data, and the moment those results are expressed as scores, inequality can be justified as the "just deserts" each person is owed for their own efforts and actions.
Even so, banning the collection and use of data cannot be the answer. To enjoy the convenience of platforms, one inevitably has to provide data. Change can instead begin by asking who classifies and ranks us by what standards, and who benefits from that ranking. That is why, rather than rejecting rankings and evaluations outright, we must keep questioning what standards and interests lie hidden behind numbers that appear objective and fair. Priced at 18,000 won.
