Colonization of the Web: How is Capitalism using Big Data to favor its interests? (original) (raw)

Big Data: From modern fears to enlightened and vigilant embrace of new beginnings

Big Data & Society

In The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale develops a critique of asymmetrical power: corporations’ secrecy is highly valued by legal orders, but persons’ privacy is continually invaded by these corporations. This response proceeds in three stages. I first highlight important contributions of The Black Box Society to our understanding of political and legal relationships between persons and corporations. I then critique a key metaphor in the book (the one-way mirror, Pasquale’s image of asymmetrical surveillance), and the role of transparency and ‘watchdogging’ in its primary policy prescriptions. I then propose ‘relational selfhood’ as an important new way of theorizing interdependence in an era of artificial intelligence and Big Data, and promoting optimal policies in these spheres.

Social Theory and the Politics of Big Data and Method

Sociology, 2016

This article is an intervention in the debate on big data. It seeks to show, first, that behind the wager to make sociology more relevant to the digital there lies a coherent if essentially unstated vision and a whole stance which are more a symptom of the current world than a resolute endeavour to think that world through; hence the conclusion that the perspective prevailing in the debate lacks both the theoretical grip and the practical impulse to initiate a much needed renewal of social theory and sociology. Second, and more importantly, the article expounds an alternative view and shows by thus doing that other possibilities of engaging the digital can be pursued. The article is therefore an invitation to widen the debate on big data and the digital and a call for a more combative social theory.

Big Data & Society: Big Data & Society On behalf of

he Snowden revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, starting in 2013, along with the ambiguous complicity of internet companies and the international controversies that followed provide a perfect segue into con- temporary conundrums of surveillance and Big Data. Attention has shifted from late C20th information technologies and networks to a C21st focus on data, currently crystallized in ‘‘Big Data.’’ Big Data intensifies certain surveillance trends associated with information technology and networks, and is thus implicated in fresh but fluid configurations. This is considered in three main ways: One, the capacities of Big Data (including metadata) intensify surveillance by expanding interconnected datasets and analytical tools. Existing dynamics of influence, risk-management, and control increase their speed and scope through new techniques, especially predictive analytics. Two, while Big Data appears to be about size, qualitative change in surveillance practices is...

Life In the Big Data World. Mass Surveillance and Social Control

Life in the Big Data World. Mass Surveillance and Social Control, 2021

The problem of big data companies claiming rights to the data of individuals is a hot topic in the 21st century. This work will aim to outline the positive and negatvie aspects of the internet of things and how it impacts our social as well as private live. This work analyses why big data and mass surveillance was allowed to thrive so freely for the last decade and it asks the question, why convienience of these technologies is making it hard to fight against them. The history of surveillance is discussed from the perspective of the United States of America and it will try to answer the question: what did the US government do wrong? Furthermore, the thesis looks into the case studies of different elections in the 21st century and how big data and social surveillance effects democratic processes in different countries across the world. The work will also look into the worst kind of example of mass surveillance, namely the Uighur minority in Western China, the social credit system and different methods of spying on minotiry groups will be talked about. Finally, the thesis ends with an analysis of the current state of the legislative action that is being taken against the big data companies as well as governments. Analysis of the EU and US legislation has been conducted as these two regions are by far the most advanced in terms of the opposition to these technologies.

Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon

The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.

Introduction: Politics of Big Data Special Issue, Digital Culture & Society 2:2, 2016

This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data. We begin by recognising that the technological objects of Big Data are unprecedented in the speed, scope and scale of their computation and knowledge production. This critical dialogue is grounded in an equal recogni-tion of continuities around Big Data’s social, cultural, and political economic dimensions. Big Data, then, is political in the same way in which identity, the body, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are political, that is, as sites of struggle over meaning, interpretations, and categorisations of lived experience. Big Data is political in the way circuits of production, distribution, and consumption are political; that is, as sites where access, control and agency are unequally distrib-uted through asymmetrical power relations, including relations of data produc-tion. Big Data is political in the way contemporary politics are being reshaped by data analysis in electoral campaign strategy, and through state surveillance as strikingly evidenced by the Snowden revelations on the NSA and GCHQ. Big Data is also political in the contestation of this advanced scientific practice, wherein the generation of data at unprecedented scale promises a precise and objective measure of everyday life. However, the computational dreams of an N = all verisimilitude – that is, of datasets providing a one-to-one correspon-dence to a given phenomenon – are haunted by the normative biases embedded in all data. This is not to suggest that Big Data – more specifically processes of datafication1 – are best or at all understood as socially constructed. Indeed, discursive analysis or unreconstructed social theory cannot fully grasp how data re-articulates the social, cultural, political and economic in a deeply recursive manner. Thus, any political reckoning must equally account for the materiality of data, alongside the logic guiding its processes and the practices that deploy its tools. In short, what are the power relations animating the knowledge generated by data analytics?

My Data Is Mine What Is the Meaning of Participation in Data Capitalism?

Glimpse Volume 20, 79-97, 2019

In August 2018, several European consumer associations have launched a lawsuit against Facebook arguing that “My data is mine,” but chose not to boycott the social network in its publicity campaign. The DECO FAQ list reveals why associations did not call for a boycott: they chose instead to use Facebook to disseminate information and to answer questions consumers might have. The argument presented by the associations confronts us with intricate questions concerning the nature of civil society, mainly with respect to the linkage between the market and the public sphere. Generally, critical theorists think that the realms of necessity and freedom are found incompatible with one another. The public sphere is considered as the realm of pure freedom where citizens deliberate matters concerning the destiny of the polis. The civil society is concerned with profit and with providing for material needs. The present paper approaches these questions by considering the nature of institutional configurations of contemporary digital capitalism and, also, the kind of interactions among social agents that act inside it. Are corporate digital networks (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) permeable enough to communicative rationality to make us believe that they can host a culture of convergence and cooperative interaction among social agents such that can aspire to a rational public sphere? To answer those queries, this paper develops a) a literature review on the contradictions of modern contemporary cognitive capitalism; b) a critical analysis of activists’ statements against the use of digital networks; c) support for a critical literacy approach that identifies textual structures and contextual frameworks in digital public debate.