“You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart, and what you don’t seem to understand is that it is bigger than you”.
Carole Cadwalladr
Big Data, defined by a writer of the Columbia Journalism Review, as a “catchall label that describes the new way of understanding the world through the analysis of vast amounts of data” (Lemov). Big data can be very helpful for companies and ways for analyzing users’ behaviors, psychographics, and demographics online. However, there is a certain point where it becomes illegal, and a violation of property.
In the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, it begins with Associate Professor of media design of the Parsons School of Design, David Carroll. His data was taken illegally by Cambridge Analytica and in the film, shows this tweet:
There are lots of people who do not take the time to scroll through, read every word of the terms & conditions before downloading an application or registering a new social media account. Many people in the documentary were truly starting to wonder who is “feeding” the fear and taking thousands of people’s data on social media. Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm hired by President Trump’s campaign in 2016, gained the access of over 50 million Facebook users. They received not only their information, but the data of their friends network, and many more. The firm got a hold of their lives, personalities, and could influence their voting behavior. There were personality quizzes on Facebook, that appeared as a fun activity, but in reality were ways to get to the “persuadeables”, that were usually located in the swing states. Ads, links, articles, targeted messages, would bombard these people on every platform they were visiting, until they saw the world they way they wanted them to for the election day. Here, big data is very damaging to society and invades the privacy of many users.
“We are all now primed to give ourselves up to big data” (Lemov)
In the article, Big Data is People, Powell describes big data throughout history as being a preparation tool for modern research subjects. We have become trained on how to participate in studies, how to answer them, offer up the area of the self to scrutiny, and the level of obtrusiveness that destructs our privacy.
In the documentary, The Great Hack, Brittany Kaiser, a former employee for Cambridge Analytica, declares to the public how “you shouldn’t win by cheating”. Using Facebook was a propaganda machine for presidential campaigns and even showed how the company asked professors of Cambridge University for data.
Artificial Intelligence
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In big data analytics, people have been using artificial intelligence to help them look deeper into the mass amounts of people’s information and extract predictions. With all of the data, scientists and analysts need the certain insights from it all and getting down to the specifics. Looking into the more positive side of things, AI will eventually lead to more innovations in every industry and be an effective tool used with big data. For example, they say that “big data applications in sales and marketing help with figuring out which customers are likely to buy, renew or churn, by crunching large amounts of internal and external data, increasingly in real-time” (Turck).
Although, the use of big data can be highly effective and great for industries’ development in the future, it can in fact lead to a point of destruction in lots of other cases.
Lemov, Rebecca. “Why Big Data Is Actually Small, Personal and Very Human – Rebecca Lemov: Aeon Essays.” Aeon. Aeon Media Group Ltd., April 2, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/why-big-data-is-actually-small-personal-and-very-human.
Mattturck. “Is Big Data Still a Thing? (The 2016 Big Data Landscape).” Matt Turck. WordPress, December 20, 2017. https://mattturck.com/big-data-landscape/.
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