Project Title

Amplifying the Stakes of "Data Loss Grief": The Emotional and Material Impact on Users' Personal Information Sovereignty Following Digital Platform and ICT Infrastructure Collapse

Research Project

Melissa Vincent’s research project — inspired by her career as a music journalist at the editorial helm of various online outlets — examines how the conditions that lead to the atrophy and termination of digital platforms and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructures have cascading consequences that produce collective experiences of “data loss grief” for users. Her research seeks to demonstrate that when platform owners discontinue services, databases, and platforms, based on the profit-driven rationale of globally integrated systems of techno-capitalism, emotionally burdened digital lifeworlds can affect the livelihoods and dignity of users.

Her research addresses a gap in existing scholarship by establishing a relationship between the intentional breakdown of information infrastructures that store personal data, and the inherited legacies of systemic artifact destruction, based on feminist and postcolonial theories of eradication and destruction. Her work believes that by dimensionalizing the systemic impacts of technological grief, centering the experiences of users who have developed ad hoc workarounds for missing data, and emphasizing gestures of refusal, abstraction, and relationality, an equity-oriented technological liberation becomes possible.   

Her disciplinary framework is situated in the expansive fields of Critical Media Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Black Studies.

Biography

Melissa Vincent is a music journalist and researcher based in Toronto and London. Her work broadly investigates justice-oriented inquiries of intimacy, relationality and community formation as they relate to technology and culture. She holds a Master of Information from the University of Toronto. She was an inaugural research fellow at the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis at the Faculty of Information and was awarded the 2024 Hilda Wilson Fellowship in Technology, Information, and Culture.

In 2022, she was nominated for a Digital Publishing Award by the National Magazine Association in the category for Best Science and Technology Storytelling for her essay, "Ethical AI Has Not Solved Tech’s Problem with Racism." Her essay, “How Metal Heals: On Screaming as an Act of Radical Reclamation” was included in the Invisible Publishing List of “Best Canadian Music Writing” and has been included in the syllabi of cultural studies courses at New York University, McMaster University, and Toronto Metropolitan University.

She’s a frequent on-air music correspondent for The National, the flagship news and current affairs television program from Canada’s public broadcaster. She has moderated or spoken on panels at over 50 conferences and festivals around the world, including MUTEK (CAN), Eurosonic (NL), Linecheck (IT), and Elevate (CAN), among others.

Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Elle Canada, The Globe and Mail, Billboard, NPR Music, and The Fader, among others. In the past, she’s led editorial direction and strategy for projects commissioned by Universal Music Canada, YouTube Originals, and Blue Ant Media. She also produced a podcast to support the launch of This Is Pop, an 8-part music docuseries on Netflix. She was part of the writing and research team for the documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, co-produced by Banger Films and the National Film Board of Canada, which premiered at SXSW 2024.

She’s a Prism Prize juror, a SOCAN Songwriting Prize Panelist, a member of the Toronto Music Advisory Committee, and the Mayor's ArtworxTO External Advisory Committee. From 2019 to 2024, she was selected to become the Polaris Music Prize jury foreperson and chair, and to join their board of directors.

Melissa’s doctoral work is supported at the LSE by a PhD Studentship.