Abstract

[Digital persona, Big Data and public sphere. What challenges for the democracy to come]. The datification of the society has opened up unthinkable possibilities to improve the quality of our life, but it also poses new challenges. How to ensure that data is not used to enforce invasive control of our lives? How to avoid that the algorithms decide for us even when we don’t want it? How to defend our freedom from cyber-elites as much powerful as they are obscure? In this article, I will illustrate some of the dimensions underlying the relationship between our self-representations in the form of data and the public sphere in an attempt to illuminate that dark side where democracy risk to be confined.