[Air-L] Winner of the 2025 Nancy Baym Book Award

[AoIR Association Coordinator]

The AoIR Nancy Baym Annual Book Award committee is happy to announce the
winner of this year’s award. We received nearly 30 nominations for 2025 and
the decision was not an easy one. The winner of the 2025 Nancy Baym Book
Award is T*he Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the
Age of Algorithmic Surveillance* by Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert (The
MIT Press). This book makes a distinctive and timely contribution to the
study of data and, more importantly, a critical intervention in how we
understand the cultural, political, and social significance of data in
contemporary life. The book addresses one of the most pressing issues in
internet research and public policy today: the ways in which data
circulate, mutate, and elude fixed meaning, shaping—and being shaped
by—human interpretation across systems, societies, and time.

In advancing their argument, Sinnreich and Gilbert develop a compelling and
eclectic theoretical base and deploy a variety of methods to reveal the
“secret life” of data as both concept and asset. The book identifies the
core tension at the heart of datafied life: rather than merely entailing
numerical values, data have become deeply entangled with what it means to
be human, yet remain profoundly unstable in meaning and resistant to
technological control.

What distinguishes *The Secret Life of Data* is also its side-door approach
to a subject that might otherwise be well-worn. Its global
perspective—global not in geographic scope alone, but in its capacity to
offer a contextualized, aerial view of post-digital immersion—sets it apart
from much of the literature.

Finally, Sinnreich and Gilbert’s writing style strikes a careful balance
between accessibility and complexity. The book is firmly grounded in solid
scholarship, yet it is engaging and approachable for both academic and
non-academic audiences. In today’s data-saturated environment, *The Secret
Life of Data* is both timely and transformative—revealing the hidden
dimensions of data that shape our lives and giving readers the tools to see
beyond its surface into its secret life.

The committee would also like to recognize,* Algorithms of Resistance: The
Everyday Fight Against Platform Power* by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré
(The MIT Press) with an Honorable Mention. This book makes an innovative
and timely contribution to the saturated research field on the role of
algorithms in society. By focusing on the precarious labor force of
delivery drivers, Trere and Bonini shed new light on the micropolitics of
“gaming the algorithm” and the interfaces through which algorithmic power
is experienced, negotiated, and resisted. This perspective, reminiscent of
Weapons of the Weak, highlights how human and strategic agency can
influence, reshape, and even subvert what platforms produce. International
in scope, Algorithms of Resistance further offers a fresh comparative angle
and provides a rich foundation for future research.

AoIR is very grateful for the work of this year’s committee: Jun Liu,
Committee Chair (University of Copenhagen); Nancy Baym, (Microsoft); Dr
Niki Cheong (King’s College London); Dr Helton Levy (London Metropolitan
University); Robert Tynes (Bard College); John McNutt (University of
Delaware); Sarah Murray, (University of Michigan).