Politics and Epistemology of Big Data: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss Big Data as a suite of new methods for social and political research. I will start by tracing a genealogy of the idea that machine can perform better than human beings in managing extremely huge quantity of data, and that the quantity of information could change the quality of the interrogation posed to those data.

In the second part of the paper I will analyse Big Data as a social and rhetorical construction of the politics of research, claiming in favour of a more detailed account of the consequences for its progressive institutionalization. Without a serious methodological assessment of the changes that these new methods produce in the scientific epistemology of social and political sciences, we risk to underestimate the distortive or uncontrollable effects of the massive use of computer techniques. The challenge is how to avoid situations in which it is very difficult to reproduce the designed experiment, and it is arduous to explain the theories that can justify the output of researches. As an exemplification of the problem I will discuss the work on emotional contagion led by Facebook and published on PNAS in 2014.

Until now it was difficult to explore all the Big Data projects’ consequences on the perception of human intelligence and on the future of social research methods. The vision that there is no way to manage social data than to follow the results of a machine learning algorithm that works on inaccessible, epistemologically opaque and uncontrollable systems is rather problematic and deserve some extra consideration.

Verwisch Die Spuren

[…]

Was immer du sagst, sag es nicht zweimal

Findest du deinen Gedanken bei einem andern: verleugne ihn.

Wer seine Unterschrift nicht gegeben hat, wer kein Bild hinterließ

Wer nicht dabei war, wer nichts gesagt hat

Wie soll der zu fassen sein!

Verwisch die Spuren!

Sorge, wenn du zu sterben gedenkst

Daß kein Grabmal steht und verrät, wo du liegst

Mit einer deutlichen Schrift, die dich anzeigt

Und dem Jahr deines Todes, das dich überführt!

Noch einmal:

Verwisch die Spuren!

(Das wurde mir gelehrt.)

Erase Traces

[…]

Whatever you say, don’t say it twice

If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them

He who has signed nothing, who has left no picture behind

Who was not there at the time, who has said nothing

How are they to catch him!

Erase the traces!

Make sure, when you turn your thoughts to dying

That no gravestone divulges where you lie

With a clear inscription indicting you

And the year of your death, which convicts you!

Once again,

Erase the traces!

(That’s what I was told.)

Berthold Brecht 1926