Big Data—A new medium?

This edited volume of essays explores questions arising from the contemporary phenomenon of Big Data. As data structures and algorithms become more and more dominant in determining the form and direction of our lives, the contributors to this work interrogate the problems posed by the increasing influence data have over modern life. Indeed, the book’s parts are structured around the concept of ‘patterning’; knowledge, time, culture, people all proceed in one sense or another according to patterns—we might say, with Heidegger, patterns of the unfolding of Being. But how is that unfolding, the collection of patterns by which we live our lives and the concepts by which we live them, altered in a world increasingly governed according to the abstract schemata of data structures? Do big data represent a fundamental change in the modalities of human existence? How should these data structures be characterized? What will be the contemporary relationship between the individual and the collective under data-driven regimes of surveillance and categorisation?

Such questions motivate, in different ways, the authors of this volume. As Natasha Lushetich (ed.), channelling Derrida, represents the issue in her introduction, problems of big data can be thought in terms of the reduction of l’avenir (the unfolding future) to le futur (that which is programmed, patterned, by the present) (2021:, p. 2). And, without attempting to define and constrain in definite terms that which is still evolving, the book seeks to assay ‘big data as a constellation and a multifaceted process of transformation that … occurs largely beyond the realm of human consciousness.’ (8) This work, indeed, could be viewed as an exploratory ingress into territory new, fecund, and as yet barely trodden; for while much has been written already, the phenomenon remains hard to grasp in full, and so much more will be needed before all the implications of modern technical paradigms can be understood. The scope of the volume is, nevertheless, broad, and covers a wide range of questions arising from modern data-driven methodologies from how these affect the unfolding of knowledge and time to biometric security to creative AI’s.

The volume is divided into four parts consisting of three essays, each connected with the overall theme of patterning. Part I considers the relationship between big data and knowledge and time; part II relates to use and extraction; part III interrogates the effects of modern data-driven paradigms on cultural heritage and memory; and part IV informs the scope of debate around people and the ineluctable effects of big data on their lives and how they live.

Part I: patterning and time

Essays by Ingrid M. Hoofd, Franco Berardi, and Abelard Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka comprise the first part. Each of them considers a particular aspect of big data’s influence on, expansion, or fundamental alteration of conceptions of knowledge and time. As with all of the sections in this book, the essays contained in it examine its theme from multifarious perspectives. The praxical, in Hoofd’s contribution, for instance, examining the effects of big data on research institutions, is included alongside the abstract and the metaphysical, as we see in Berardi’s article considering implications for our possible expressions of being and the horizons of our self-conceptions. But the common of all the essays here is inscription, determination of the future using the power of algorithms and data structures either as a predictive tool or as a means to predetermine ends with greater efficacy than human action alone could achieve.

Hoofd, in ‘Big Data And/Versus People: On the Ambiguities of Humanistic Research’ (17-31), investigates the ways in which contemporary data-driven methodologies impact research and researchers at large institutions, with Utrecht University serving as an example. Arguing against the simplistic ascription of the neo-liberalisation of modern universities to big data and its depersonalisation of research activity, she suggests a more nuanced approach encompassing the good and the bad might be more productive. What needs to be thought through, she proposes, is the character of data-driven research in terms of its tendency towards the monological subordination of everything to a single prescriptive task.

Berardi, in ‘Simulated Replicants Forever? Big Data, Engendered Determinism, and the End of Prophecy’ (32-45), asks, after Baudrillard, whether it is we who generate big data or big data which generate us. His contribution described the processes of increasing automatisation engendered in the era of big data. Our lives are, he suggests, increasingly subject to the prescriptions of data models, whose capacity for inscribing future states of affairs from the present far exceed that of any human thought or action.

Gil-Fournier and Parikka, in ‘Visual Hallucination of Probable Events: On Environments of Images, Data, and Machine Learning’ (46-60), look at AI and its capability to predict future events from images utilising big data. They investigate the difficulties and challenges of frame prediction in video media and the theoretical frameworks which need to be examined to address them.

Part II: patterning use and extraction

This part addresses issues surrounding use and extraction. Consisting of contributions from Btihaj Ajana, Tim Christaens, and Lonce Wyse, it problematises the individual as subject of data collection and classification in different contexts. The common theme here is that of systematization and subjection through new means of control facilitated by big data, as well as an exploration of the capabilities of AI making use of contemporary data-driven methods.

In the first of the essays of this section, Ajana (63-79) discusses biometric technologies, in particular those relating to ‘border control, digital humanitarianism, and self-tracking.’ (76) She interrogates the effects of biometric data collection on individuals and their personhood, asking whether these new methods of categorisation and technological control are overly intrusive. In the second essay, Christaens (80-93) considers the effects of data collection and technological persuasion on individuals currently employed in the so-called ‘gig’ economy. He examines these issues through a Marxian and Foucauldian lens to compare the dehumanisation involved in companies such as Uber to the introduction of machines into factories. Finally, Wyse (94-112) considers whether deep learning neural networks can exhibit creativity by illustrating ‘five different examples of behaviours associated with creativity’. (110)

Part III: patterning cultural heritage and memory

This part is composed of essays by Craig J. Saper, Nicola Horsley, and Natasha Lushetich and Masaki Fujihata. Here, the contributions examine multifariously issues relating to scope and level of analysis (Saper), intellectual autonomy as it relates to artificial intelligence when used as a means to catalogue and preserve cultural heritage (Horsley), and Lushetich and Fujihata write about how big data is employed to facilitate Fujihata’s artistic BeHere project.

The key themes in this section relate to the effects of modern data usage on issues of culture and memory. Each is concerned, differently from other parts of the book, less with the sociological, political, and power-dynamic aspects of the subject than with the way in which our collective memories are influenced, enhanced, or altered by some facet. For instance, Saper (115-129) considers this issue from the perspective of scale; utilising the metaphor of ‘zooming out and zooming in’ (115), Saper asks how the scope of the dataset, within a dataset, influences the way in which we perceive the matter. Lushetich and Fujihata (145-159), alternatively, are interested in the way big data can be used to enhance artistic project such as BeHere, a project concerned with memory, or, as they put it, ‘bringing the past into the present’. (157)

Part IV: patterning people

Part four features essays from Dominic Smith, Mitra Azar, and Simon Biggs. This part examines, in different ways, the thrown subject, or, in the information age, the subject as a fraction of the larger data-constructed frame—the ‘dividual’ as both Smith and Azar term it, following Deleuze (i.e., 164; 177). In all three essays, it could be said that the individual is an expression of the broader technically mediated framework. Each invokes Deleuze, and each considers in its own way the interpellated individual in its wider relationship with the algorithmic data structures that inform its shape and thinking.

In the first essay, Smith (163-176) argues that, in addition to Floridi’s notion of big data as essentially an epistemological problem (164), it should be though of just as much as an aesthetic problem. He considers the importance of images as metaphorical and allegorical extensions of concepts, and which inform the way those concepts are viewed (and understood). The second, by Azar (177-190), deals with the use of AI to generate faces, using real-world data. He uses his project, DoppelGANger.agency, to illustrate both the advantages and risks of this data-driven power. Finally, Biggs (191-205) regards the problem of big data through the prism of artworks seeking to represent the individual as heterogeneous and which seek to represent that ‘mediation through data.’ (203)

In summary

The work examines the issues of big data from multifarious perspectives. There is, in each contribution to this volume, a clear sense of circumspection concerning the issues of data-driven technologies. What at one time might appear to augment, to free, or enhance can also be seen, from another direction, to diminish and constrict our horizons. The book asks whether big data is a new medium; that is, does it constitute a new way of disclosing the world? It does not attempt to provide an unambiguous answer to this question, but it does lay open the field of research yet to be conducted in this nascent and important area of thought. Certainly, the work represents a significant effort to come to terms with a phenomenon whose implications are as yet not fully grasped or understood.

This volume will be indispensable for anyone working on issues surrounding the application and theory of big data. Whether it be concerned with the philosophy, sociology, economics, or even aesthetics of data-driven technologies, this book illustrates the scope of the problems to which contemporary uses of data give rise.