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 The 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).
