Datafication and discrimination

K.H.A. Leurs, Tamara Shepherd

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Popular accounts of datafied ways of knowing implied in the ascendance of big data posit that the increasingly massive volume of information collected immanently to digital technologies affords new means of understanding complex social processes. The development of novel insights is attributed precisely to big data’s unprecedented scale, a scale that enables what Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier note is a shift away from causal inferences to modes of analysis based rather on ‘the benef its of correlation’ (2013: 18). Indicating the vast implications of this shift, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier’s influential framing of big data describes a revolutionary change in the ways ‘we live, work and think’, as phrased by the book’s subtitle. But the ‘we’ in this proclamation tends to go unspecif ied. Who exactly benef its from a shift toward correlative data analysis techniques in an age of big data? And by corollary, who suffers?
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Datafied Society
Subtitle of host publicationStudying Culture through Data
Place of PublicationAmsterdam
PublisherAmsterdam University Press
Pages211-231
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)978 90 4853 101 1
ISBN (Print)978 94 6298 136 2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

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