Mirko Tobias Schäfer is a media scholar at Utrecht University who holds a Ph.D. in media studies and communication, affiliated with the University of Vienna and Utrecht University. He is an Associate Professor of AI, Data & Society at the Department for Information & Computing Sciences and the Sciences Lead of the Data School, with the official website http://mtschaefer.net/.

Schäfer studied theater and media studies and communication science at the University of Vienna and digital culture at Utrecht University. He obtained a Ph.D. in 2008 at Utrecht University. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities at Utrecht University under Rosi Braidotti and a Mercator Research Fellow at the NRW School of Governance. In 2011 he was awarded a fellowship at the University of Applied Arts Vienna to study technology use and epistemic practices in art.

Schäfer's research revolves around (digital) technology, and how it transforms society. He publishes on digital culture, cultural theory, new media, big data, and artificial intelligence. From 2022 to 2025 he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Helsinki. Schäfer also serves on the Advisory Council Analytics of the Ministry of Finance (Netherlands).

Earlier, Schäfer conducted research on hacker communities, user participation, and their impact on cultural industries.^[1] In stark contrast to the general field of new media studies, his research on participatory culture provides a critical deconstruction of user participation. Coining the term of an extended culture industry, he builds upon the cultural critique of the Frankfurt School, most notably Adorno and Horkheimer, to show to what extent the appropriation of design by users is embedded into corporate production. Schäfer's contribution to the field of participatory culture was his distinction between explicit and implicit participation, delivering a terminology to separate conscious and active user engagement from user activities channeled by user interface design.^[2,3] Explicit participation refers to conscious activities of cultural production and social interaction as covered by Henry Jenkins in his work on fan culture, while implicit participation refers to subtle ways of channeling user activities through interface design. In his analysis focusing on the role of user interface design, platform governance, and methods of controlling and channeling user activities, Schäfer considers strategies of implicit participation as a key aspect in popular social media applications, arguing that media practices developed using the World Wide Web are now implemented in easy-to-use interfaces and new business models.^[4,6] Schäfer's analysis of participatory culture depicts an accurate "shift within the commercial media industries to embrace certain conceptions of the fan as an idealized consumer of transmedia entertainment."^[5]

Since 2015, his research has been situated in the field of critical data studies, investigating the transformational impact of datafication, data practices, and artificial intelligence on the public sphere, citizenship, democracy, and public management. He is a co-author of the Fundamental Rights & Algorithms Impact Assessment (FRAIA), developed by an interdisciplinary team of scholars at Utrecht University.^[7]

Together with Thomas Boeschoten, who was an MA student at the time, Schäfer founded the Utrecht Data School in 2013 as a platform for teaching data analysis and digital methods. Initially, a lack of funding pushed the founders to reach out to external partners, such as corporations, government organisations, and NGOs, to finance their course through commissioned research projects. That allowed them and their students to work on actual projects and experience how datafication manifests and transforms organisations.

Consequently, the Utrecht Data School developed services and products that would enable researchers to enter societal fields as "experts and not as mere researchers," an approach Schäfer dubbed entrepreneurial research.^[8,9] An example of this is their Data Ethics Decision Aid (DEDA), which is a dialogic process for evaluating data projects and developing value-sensitive design.^[10] While organizations using DEDA can review and improve their data practices considering values and responsibilities, the researchers who function as workshop moderators can gather empirical data about the participants' awareness for data ethics, the organization's operational capacities, and their data practices.

In 2009, Amsterdam University Press published "Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology" (ISBN 978-90-8964-068-0), co-authored by M.T. Schäfer, M. Van den Boomen, A.S. Lehmann, S. Lammes, and J. Raessens. On December 31, 2011, Amsterdam University Press published "Bastard Culture!: How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production". In 2017, Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin Es authored "The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data", released through Amsterdam University Press. In 2024, Amsterdam University Press published "Collaborative Research in the Datafied Society: Methods and Practices for Investigation and Intervention" (ISBN 9789463727679), authored by M.T. Schäfer, K. Van Es, and T.P. Lauriault.