In the last two decades, with climate change and its negative consequences becoming increasingly visible, we have witnessed a flourishing of documentary films focusing on environmental issues. Looking at these productions from an ecomaterialist perspective, the essay first underlines how, surprisingly, they have a substantial environmental footprint that is at odds with their contents...

The Covid-19 pandemic provoked greater digitalisation of personal data and deepened the ongoing process of algorithmic governance. In order to reopen to tourism and balance the spread of the virus while keeping travellers and locals safe, countries established various rules for border crossing, such as digital passenger locator forms (PLFs), while some countries, such as Greece, implemented an algorithm (EVA) to analyse these PLFs. This transfer of data raises important questions about personal data privacy rights and informed consent. This study explored the perceptions of travellers towards these new rules, the sharing of additional personal data, and their imaginaries of the possible algorithmic work behind it. Qualitative interviews were conducted with ethnic Estonian and Russian-speaking Estonian graduates in Estonia (n=14) regarding their insights on (1) the perceived norms of sharing personal data and the use of the data by governmental authorities while travelling and (2) the perceptions of datafied/algorithmically controlled travel during the pandemic, with additional insight on the differences between the two groups. The interviewees weren’t against the PLFs or algorithmic processing in principle, but where they saw poor implementation or design, or where they felt that things had been done in semi-secrecy. According to the interviewees, datafication and algorithmic governance require deeper consideration of transparency, clarity, and communication to achieve truly informed consent and resolve unease with the creeping influence of algorithms.

This paper intends to address the issue of communication in a broad sense as dominant within a social as well as existential landscape currently impoverished by the sense of community. This does not mean to moralistically evaluate this prevalence of communication on supposed substantial substrates, considered more authentic, but rather to consider in what sense the absence of community, with the disappearance of its shared rituals and symbolic narratives, first of all entails for society and for the individual a mythization of the communication process and, ultimately, the relative demythization that we are perhaps witnessing...