We are in need of critical discussions exploring the tensions between travel writing as a textual genre and the medium that carries it. Indeed, we are witnessing a proliferation of mediations and mediatisations of travel writing across platforms and media, which further enriches and diversifies the poetics of the genre, urging to link it to the politics that lie behind the textualisation of travelling and writing as practices. This chapter presents three case studies in which the dynamics of mediati(sati)on play a crucial role: The travel book Crónica de viaje, by Jorge Carrión, which questions the generic features of travel writing by foregrounding the role of the Web as a meta-medium; two Instagram travel influencers and their different visualisations of what it means to be ‘on the road’; and 1 the Road, the first travelogue written by an Artificial Neural Network. Through these examples it is possible to draw broader reflections on the consubstantiality of genre and medium -poetics and politics -and point to possible future lines of research.

Purpose: This study advances a reconceptualization of data and information which overcomes normative understandings often contained in data policies at national and international levels. This study aims to propose a conceptual framework that moves beyond subject- and collective-centric normative understandings. Design/methodology/approach: To do so, this study discusses the European Union (EU) and China’s approaches to data-driven technologies highlighting their similarities and differences when it comes to the vision underpinning how tech innovation is shaped. Findings: Regardless of the different attention to the subject (the EU) and the collective (China), the normative understandings of technology by both actors remain trapped into a positivist approach that overlooks all that is not and cannot be turned into data, thus hindering the elaboration of a more holistic ecological thinking merging humans and technologies. Originality/value: Revising the philosophical and political debate on data and data-driven technologies, a third way is elaborated, i.e. federated data as commons. This third way puts the subject as part by default of a collective at the centre of discussion. This framing can serve as the basis for elaborating sociotechnical alternatives when it comes to define and regulate the mash-up of humans and technology.

The article explores algorithmic governance through the lenses of Foucault's work on governmentality. Algorithms are understood as “technologies of power” that literally “subjectify” the individuals upon which they act. Our main focus is on Syrian refugees in two national contexts - Estonia and Turkey - and we consider four types of algorithms to which refugees are subjected: relocation, police risk scoring, recommendation algorithms and online advertisements. The goal is to explore the “algorithmic imaginaries” of both refugees and Estonian experts who work with migration data about these technologies, via a series of interviews with 19 refugees and 24 data experts. Our findings show that, while relocation and police risk scoring algorithms are perceived as technologies of power responsible for producing macro-differences without paying sufficient attention to individual needs, recommendation and ad algorithms are seen as less threatening, i.e. as “technologies of the self”. From here, we suggest reconsidering algorithmic governance as an iterative practice to eventually transform the datafied “knowledge of the self”, suitable for algorithms, into a true “care of the self”.