Trust, Disconnection, Minimizing risk and Apathy: A Compass of Coping Tactics in Datafied Everyday Lives

This paper investigates how audiences are coping with the digital platforms that they encounter in their everyday lives and how they cope with platforms the data tracking, collecting data and mining data. Empirically grounded in focus groups carried out in Roskilde, Denmark, with a total of 34 participants of different ages and education background we present the results of an analysis of coping tactics(de Certeau, 1988), namely coping by absence, coping by trust, coping by min-imizing risk and coping by apathy. While absence is often chosen when the participants evaluate the cons to outweigh the pros in relation to their perceived dependence of the digital platform, min-imizing includes strategies such as not posting, lurking, turning off the camera or geo-location. This enables us to show how different coping tactics are employed differently depend-ing on the context of the habitual situation and digital routines, the data collected (fx sensitive to non-sensitive data), and the platform the audiences engages with and the dependence of the platform (fx private vs. public, national vs. international platforms and apps). The contextual factors is presented in a model – a coping compass - drawing on the dichotomies found across the material, which can serve as an analytical tool for studying individual users coping tactics in datafied everyday lives.