Big Data—A new medium?

Abstract

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 datadriven 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.