Young people and the data gaze: experiencing datafication in everyday life

Young people’s capacity to see and know themselves is increasingly informed by algorithmic and classificatory logics. In this article, we extend Beer’s concept of the data gaze, drawing from qualitative empirical examples to illustrate how young people navigate and incorporate datafied ways of seeing and knowing in their everyday practices via engagement with financial technology (fintech) and photo editing apps. We argue that whilst young people are increasingly ‘gazed upon’ in their interactions with fintech and image-editing apps, that is, categorised and imagined by algorithmic and machinic processes, they also gaze back. We explore two specific aspects of the broader data gaze: (1) datafied money and the financialised gaze that young people experience when being nudged while using gamified fintech services, and (2) datafied bodies and the forensic gaze young people use to inform selfie-editing practices through digital ‘corrections’ to their faces and bodies. The implications of these ever-finer capacities for predictive classificatory processes are essential for understanding how life feels under the gaze of the data industry, and how inequalities and exclusions are made, automated and remade in contemporary datafied lives.