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ABSTRACT
The ideology of dataism has been highly influential during the first two decades of the 21st century, impacting emergent Big Data analytic technologies’ practical application and how the public receives them. In this article, I draw upon William R. Brown's Rhetoric of Social Intervention to interpret the dataism ideology as a communication process. I argue dataism comprises constituent discourses of attention, power, and need that combine to create, reify, and maintain an understanding of Big Data technologies rooted in technoliberalism and technoutopianism. Interplay between these systems has helped keep intact a generally positive public view of Big Data, naming it a collection of innovative technologies that use large quantities of previously unused data to progress social and economic decision-making. I conclude by suggesting the ecosystem of rhetorical interventions into dataism's discourses helps explain how Big Data has grown more popular despite repeated scandals and argue interpreting dataism as a communication process offers fruitful ground for research and critical intervention.
Notes
1 danah boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon,” Information, Communication, & Society 15, no. 5 (2011): 675, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878
2 Carolyn R. Miller, “Learning from History: World War II and the Culture of High Technology,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 12, no. 3 (1998): 310, https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651998012003002.
3 The White House, “Press Release: Obama Administration Unveils ‘Big Data’ Initiative: Announces $200 Million in New R&D Investments,” Obama White House Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, March 29, 2012, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/19/release-obama-administration-unveils-big-data-initiative-announces-200
4 Christopher Lee Adamczyk, “Big Data, Congress, and the Rhetoric of Technology: Or, How to Industrialize cyberspace,” Poroi 16, no. 1 (2021): 4–6, https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1284.
5 Glenn Greenwald, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily,” The Guardian, June 6, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order.
6 Emily Bell, Taylor Owen, and Smitha Khorana, “Introduction.” In Journalism after Snowden: The Future of the Press in the Surveillance State, eds. Emily Bell and Taylor Owen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 2.
7 Stefka Hristova, Soonkwan Hong, and Jennifer Daryl Slack, “In the Presence of Algorithms.” In Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life, eds. Stefka Hristova, Jennifer Daryl Slack, and Soonkwan Hong (New York: Lexington Books, 2021), 1–14; Damien S. Pfister, “The Terms of Technoliberalism.” In Theorizing Digital Rhetoric, eds. Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 32–42.
8 Thomas Malaby. Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Labs and Second Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 16.
9 Adam Fish, Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 7.
10 Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski, “Introduction: Historicizing Big Data,” Osiris 32, no. 1 (2017): 2, https://doi.org/10.1086/693399.
11 “Global spending on big data and analytics solutions will reach $215.7 billion in 2021, according to a new IDC spending guide,” Buisnesswire, August 17, 2021, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210817005182/en/Global-Spending-on-Big-Data-and-Analytics-Solutions-Will-Reach-215.7-Billion-in-2021-According-to-a-New-IDC-Spending-Guide.
12 “Background,” Federal Data Strategy, accessed on June 27, 2022, https://strategy.data.gov/background/.
13 Frank Pasquale, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 1.
14 Herbert Marcuse, The One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge, 1964).
15 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Hawthorne, CA: BN Publishing, 1905).
16 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977); Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983).
17 Carolyn R. Miller, “Rhetoric, Technology, and the Pushmi-Pullyu.” In Rhetoric and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, ed. Stuart A. Selber (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), ix-xii; Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 59–64.
18 Astrid Mager, “Algorithmic Ideology: How Capitalist Society Shapes Research Engines,” Information, Communication, & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 769–771, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.676056.
19 Jose van Dijk, “Datafication, Dataism, and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology,” Surveillance & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 198–199, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776.
20 Ruah Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim code (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 26.
21 William R. Brown, “Ideology as Communication Process,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64, no. 2 (1978): 123–140.
22 Zoltan P. Majdik, “Five Considerations for Engaging with Big Data from a Rhetorical-Humanistic Perspective,” Poroi 16, no. 1 (2021): 1, https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1312.
23 Aronova, von Oertzen, and Sepkoski, “Introduction: Historicizing Big Data,” 3.
24 Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution that will Transform How we Live, Work, and Think (London: John Murray Publishers, 2013), 73–97.
25 Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity and Variety,” META Group Research Note 6, no. 70 (2001): 1–2, http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf.
26 boyd and Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” 633.
27 Majdik, “Five Considerations for Engaging with Big Data from a Rhetorical-Humanistic Perspective,” 3.
28 Kate Crawford, Kate Miltner, and Mary L. Gray, “Critiquing Big Data: Politics, Ethics, and Epistemology,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 1664.
29 Daniel Faltesek, “Big Argumentation?” TripleC 11, no. 2 (2013): 405.
30 Candice Lanius and Gaines Hubbell, “The New Data: Argumentation Amid, On, With, and In Data.” In Theorizing Digital Rhetoric, eds. Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 126–28.
31 Pacey, The Culture of Technology, 8.
32 David Brooks, “Opinion: The Philosophy of Data,” The New York Times, February 4, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html.
33 Van Dijk, “Datafication, Dataism, and Dataveillance,” 198.
34 Steve Lohr, Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and almost Everything Else (New York: Harper Business, 2015), 1–11.
35 Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 17.
36 James A. Herrick, Visions of Technological Transcendence: Human Enhancement and the Rhetoric of the Future (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2017), 35.
37 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), xiii.
38 Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 19.
39 Miller, “Learning from History,” 307.
40 Van Dijk, “Datafication, Dataism, and Dataveillance,” 198.
41 Ibid., 200.
42 Mark Andrejevic, “The Work that Affective Economics Does,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 4 (2011): 604–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.600551.
43 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 39.
44 John Cheney-Lippold, “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 167, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411424420.
45 Mager, “Algorithmic Ideology.”
46 Faltesek, “Big Argumentation?” 405.
47 Chris Ingraham, “Toward and Algorithmic Rhetoric.” In Digital Rhetoric and Global Literacies: Communication Modes and Digital Practices in the Networked World, eds. Gustav Verhulsdonck and Marohang Limbu (Hershey: IGI Global, 2014), 62–4.
48 Matthew J. Breece, “Ethical Repetitions: Rhetorical Imitations and/as Algorithmic Judgement,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 54, no. 4 (2021): 353, https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.4.0348.
49 Beth Simone Novek, “The Innovative State,” Daedalus 150, no. 3 (2021): 123, https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01863.
50 Novek, “The Innovative State,” 123.
51 Ibid., 128, 132.
52 Pfister, “The Terms of Technoliberalism,” 36.
53 Lisa M. Gring-Pemble, “‘Are We Going to now Govern by Anecdote?’ Rhetorical Constructions of Welfare Recipients in Congressional Hearings, Debates, and Legislation, 1992–1996,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 4 (2001): 360, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630109384345.
54 Brown, “Ideology as a Communication Process,” 139.
55 Mark Gring, “Moving Forward: Rhetorical Analysis of the Presbyterian Church in America's Cultural Engagement.” In Communication and the Global Landscape of Faith, ed. Adrienne E. Hacker Daniels (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), 341.
56 Van Dijk, “Datafication, Dataism, and Dataveillance,” 199; Susan Haarman, “The Data Should Not Speak for Itself: Epistemic Injustice and Data as Rhetoric,” Philosophical Studies in Education 52 (2021): 35.
57 Bohyun Kim, “The Peril of Dataism,” Online Researcher 43, no. 6 (2019): 54–56.
58 Dan Bouk, “The History and Political Economy of Personal Data over the Last Two Centuries in Three Acts,” Osiris 32, no. 1 (2017): 85, https://doi.org/10.1086/693400.
59 Brown, “Ideology as a Communication Process,” 126.
60 Ibid., 126.
61 Susan K. Opt and Mark Gring, The Rhetoric of Social Intervention (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 57.
62 Lohr, Data-ism, 3.
63 Opt and Gring, The Rhetoric of Social Intervention, 37–38.
64 Dale Neef, Digital Exhaust: What Everyone Should Know about Big Data, Digitization, and Digitally Driven Innovation (Hoboken, NJ: FT Press, 2015), 17–24.
65 Novek, “The Innovative State,” 150.
66 Ibid., 133–6.
67 Neef, Digital Exhaust, 24; Gina Neff, “Why Big Data Won't Cure Us,” Big Data 1, no. 3 (2013): 121, http://doi.org/10.1089/big.2013.0029.
68 Teun A. van Dijk, “Opinions and Ideologies in the Press.” In Approaches to Media Discourse, eds. Allan Bell and P. Garrett (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 22; Adamczyk, “Big Data, Congress, and the Rhetoric of Technology,” 16.
69 Perry Rotella, “Is Data the New Oil?” Forbes, April 2, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/perryrotella/2012/04/02/is-data-the-new-oil/?sh=542abc167db3.
70 Adamczyk, “Big Data, Congress, and the Rhetoric of Technology,” 12–16.
71 Cornelius Puschmann, and Jean Burgess, “Metaphors of Big Data,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 1701.
72 William R. Brown, “Attention and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 1 (1982): 17–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638209383588.
73 William R. Brown, “Power and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” Communication Monographs 53, no. 2 (1986): 180–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758609376135.
74 William R. Brown, “Need and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention, Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Communication Studies,” The Ohio State University; Susan K. Opt, “Mammogram-Screening Policy as Need Intervention,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 40, no. 1 (2012): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2011.636375.
75 Opt and Gring, “The Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” 58.
76 Brown, “Ideology as a Communication Process,” 131–32.
77 Mark Gring, “Attention, Power and Need: The Rhetoric of Religion and Revolution in Nicaragua,” World Communication 27, no. 4 (1998): 27–37.
78 Lohr, Data-ism, 50.
79 “Smarter Planet, Icons of Progress,” IBM 100, accessed on June 27, 2022, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/smarterplanet/.
80 Brown, “Attention and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” 27.
81 Brown, “Power and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” 185.
82 U.S. Executive Office of the President, “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values,” Obama White House Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, May 1, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/20150204_Big_Data_Seizing_Opportunities_Preserving_Values_Memo.pdf.
83 Tom Hamburger and Hayley Tsukayama, “White house releases big data and privacy report,” Washington Post, May 1, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/05/01/white-house-releases-big-data-and-privacy-report/.
84 Executive Office of the President, “Big Data,” 11–12.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., 41.
87 Ibid., 47.
88 Helen F. Nissenbaum, “Deregulating Collection: Must Privacy Give Way to use Regulation?” SSRN (2017): 4, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3092282.
89 Executive Office of the President, “Big Data,” 50.
90 Brown, “Power and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” 186.
91 Executive Office of the President, “Big Data,” 55–59.
92 Brown, “Need and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,” 4.
93 Tori DeAngelis, “Big Data Ups its Reach,” Monitor on Psychology 53, no. 1 (2022): 79–81.
94 DeAngelis, “Big Data Ups its Reach,” 79.
95 Ibid.
96 Lohr, Data-ism, 14.
97 boyd and Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” 667.
98 Opt and Gring, The Rhetoric of Social Intervention, 82–84.
99 Brown, “Ideology as a Communication Process,” 124.
100 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in a Press Conference,” Obama White House Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, August 9, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/09/remarks-president-press-conference.
101 Verizon, “First-Half U.S. Transparency Report,” July 8, 2014, https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/US-Transparency-Report-1H-2014.pdf.
102 Pfister, “The Terms of Technoliberalism,” 36.
103 Gring-Pemble, “Are We Going to Govern by Anecdote,” 342.
104 boyd and Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” 675.
105 Pasquale, New Laws of Robotics, 3–12.
106 Breece, “Ethical Repetitions,” 348–73.
107 Jared S. Colston and Steve Holmes, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2018); James J. Brown Jr., Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).