DICE is a project about digitalization and citizen empowerment. Digital infrastructures – with their increasing sorting and filtering capacity and ability to make recommendations and decisions – effects the conditions for citizen empowerment in new and complex ways – and in all fields of the lives of modern citizens. We have chosen four of the most central of these fields as the study objects for this project: 1) The access of citizens to media and culture as users/consumers/contributors as an important precondition for democratic participation; 2) the enabling of citizens’ relationships to the government as customers/clients of public services; 3) the empowerment of citizens as participants in the interactions and networks of the social life; and 4) the autonomy and influence of citizens as employees in working life.

• DICE will produce new scientific knowledge in four key areas across social life on the impact and risks of smart digital infrastructures related to democracy/empowerment.
• DICE will be theoretically transformative by its ambition and potential to renew social science and bring forth conceptual and theoretical advances in our understanding of smart digital infrastructures, how they are formed by social powers, and how they influence empowerment in the everyday lives of citizens.
• DICE will be methodologically transformative by applying a new approach to the study of digital infrastructures, the “circuit-of-infrastructures approach”.
• DICE has also a transformative potential policy-wise, by constructively and critically analyzing the development and influence of advanced digital infrastructures in relation to various perspectives on empowerment, explicating ways to avoid social harms and ways forward for the technological design, governmental regulation and societal “handling” of smart digital infrastructures in order to achieve desired policy goals.

Publications

• Ask, Kristine; Spilker, Hendrik Storstein; Hansen, Martin. The politics of user-platform relationships: Co-scripting live-streaming on Twitch.tv. First Monday 2019,Volum 24.(7)
• Di Loreto, Ines; Parmiggiani, Elena. Inquire the Way We Inquire. ID&A Interaction design & architecture(s) 2019; 38, pp. 83-88
• Grisot, Miria; Parmiggiani, Elena; Geirbo, Hanne Cecilie. Infrastructuring Internet of Things for Public Governance. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS): Beyond Digitization - Facets of Socio-Technical Change, 2018.
• Jürgens, P., Stark, B. & Magin, Melanie (2019). Two Half-Truths Make a Whole? On Bias in Self-reports and Tracking Data. Social Science Computer Review. Published online ahead of print. DOI:10.1177/0894439319831643