Do not consent! Theorizing media as counter-practice

If we are to understand our contemporary sensor media ecology, it is worthwhile to move beyond “theorizing media as practice” (Couldry). In contrast to mere usage practices, counter-practices productively exploit the flaws of sensing infrastructures. Counter-practices are minor and momentary, yet epistemically significant, as they render visible the logics of machinic perception. This author response argues that research on counter-practices is able to operate on various scales and that counter-practices are intrinsically political actions which allow the queering of the binary logics and normative “data-worldings” of today’s technologies. Conceptualizing bodies not as data sources but as agents capable of defending themselves against nonconsensual sensing, our approach shifts the analytical focus from supposedly disembodied computation to an integrated view of digital sensing as an embodied process. Altogether, studying counter-practices enables politically engaged media research that is attentive to how resistance and critique are enacted through the body in environments of pervasive datafication.