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@online{Taylor2018,

title = {Data Justice and Singapore’s Smart Nation},

author = {Linnet Taylor and Shazade Jameson and Josh Bullock and Quynh Tu Hoang and Jeroen de Vos and Maarten van Gestel and Timo Nijssen and Olivia Dziwak and Kristoffer Rekve and Yoren Lausberg and Stefany Winona Santosa and Wen Yang and Giovanni Zenga},

editor = {The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI)},

url = {https://digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SingaporeSmartNation},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-25},

urldate = {2018-01-25},

abstract = {We aimed to map the networks and key concepts involved in Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative from the perspective of the Singaporean authorities, and to map and analyse the popular response to datafication.

We found that the authorities’ narrative is clear and replicated across multiple online sources. It is authored by a mixture of government and commercial actors and has strong resonance with international discourse on smart cities. It is principally hosted via Facebook and websites belonging to the government and its partners, and there is little engagement (regarding response/re-sharing) visible online from citizens.



We were able to map the official discourse quite quickly, but a widespread/critical counter-narrative was harder to find, draw out and analyse. We found that the visible critical response to the smart nation initiative revolves principally around functionality and efficiency (‘this does not work as promised’) and that there are no clearly visible public threads of discourse around rights or surveillance in relation to data. We found concerns with datafication mainly on local news sites and Reddit.



This analysis has mainly been used to help us to identify gaps and silences on the side of citizens. The social media sources with the highest penetration in Singapore carry the government narrative almost exclusively. Those with lower penetration have some responses from citizens, but in general, the public-facing component of the smart nation initiative is governmental.



Critical voices in relation to Singapore’s datafication are largely unavailable to remotely conducted digital methods. We conclude from our investigation that it is worth using digital methods to analyse the government narrative on datafication, but that researchers hoping to identify the alternative narratives should initially do so through ethnographic fieldwork and through that generate questions that are more amenable to digital methods.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {online}

}