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

A massive quantity of information is being produced by people every second around the world, and all this data shapes the so-called Big Data. In the “Critical Questions for Big Data” Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford attempt to point out provocative questions about benefits and harms of analyzing all these traces left by society (662).

For Boyd and Crawford, the concept of Big Data is not about a huge data that requires a supercomputer to be analyzed. The Big Data, they argue, is a phenomenon that is based on the combination of three factors: 1) maximizing technology power and accuracy to work with large data sets, 2) analysing large data sets to make political, economic and social claims and 3) the mythological belief that this huge amount of data allows innovators insights (663).

Computerized database is not a novelty. According to Boyd and Crawford, it is possible to find some work with relational database emerging in the 1960s (664). However, the Internet has made these data sets available to everyone with access to its platform. Thus, Boyd and Crawford argue that is critical to understand which kind of systems are regulating and driving Big Data practices. Based on recent research involving Big Data, the authors offered six questions to encourage discussion around the theme. 1)The first one is that, in the same way Fordism automation has changed the concept of work, Big Data has rewritten the definition of knowledge. For Boyd and Crawford, the new possibilities in term of research and analysis completely changed the way people engage with information (665). 2) Once Big Data keeps a lot of social media information, it seems that now social science findings could be more accurate and objective. However, working with Big Data information still subjective and interpretative and there is no such thing as “objective truth” in social science and humanistic inquiry, posit Boyd and Crawford (667). 3) The fact that Big Data offer a large quantity of data does not mean that it is not necessary a qualitative study of events. Sometimes, a narrow study can be incredibly valuable. (670). 4) “Data are not generic. There is value to analyzing data abstractions, yet retaining context remains critical, particularly for certain lines of inquiry.” (670). The context of research is not easy to interpret and using only Big Data to do this analysis sometimes could be an error. The amount of work that sociologists and anthropologists have been done all these decades have value and still should be considered (671). 5) Ethical issues are not well investigated on Big Data uses. A lot of critical points still arguably. For Boyd and Crawford, when utilizing Big Data is important to think the uses of that information in order to act ethically. Furthermore, there are issues around control, power and truth around Big Data that should be considered by researchers using “public” information (673). 6) Collecting data needs hard work, a lot of money and a huge amount of time. Boyd and Crawford note that powerful companies and well-resourced universities have different access and a huge amount of analysis possibilities on Big Data. This acknowledgment means that Big Data creates “a new kind of digital divide: the Big Data rich and the Big Data poor.” (674).

Finally, considering all these great provocations, it is possible to say that discussions around Big Data are immature and a lot of improvements in this area should be made to guarantee an ethical and moral use of our information.  

Work Cited:

Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. (2012). “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, communication & society 15.5: 662-679.