Abstract
Kennedy argues that as social media data mining has become more ordinary, it has diversified, and so it is necessary to differentiate types of data mining, actors engaged in such practices, institutional and organisational contexts in which it takes place, and its range of purposes and consequences. It is important to attend to ordinary actors involved in social media data mining and to ask: what should concern us about ordinary social media data mining? Are there ways in which it might make a positive contribution to society? Kennedy introduces the main argument of the book: as social media data mining becomes ordinary, new data relations emerge, characterised by a widespread desire for numbers and its troubling consequences, but also by the possibility of doing good with data.
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- 1.
But the data deluge has been with us for some time: as early as 1997, David Shenk wrote that one week-day edition of the New York Times contained more data than someone living in the seventeenth century would have encountered in the whole of his or her lifetime (Shenk 1997).
- 2.
Looking further afield, beyond debates focused specifically on data and digital society, more arguments for the need for such attention to detail can be found. For example, Cruikshank opens the introductory chapter of her book The Will to Empower: democratic citizens and other subjects (2000)—the chapter is tellingly called ‘Small things’—with a call to arms from Foucault for ‘a meticulous observation of detail’ (Foucault 1984).
- 3.
Thanks to David Beer for suggesting that this book is mapping a set of ‘new data relations’—this is his term, not mine. I take the opportunity to develop it here.
- 4.
This is changing. At the time of writing this book, I organised a two-day, international conference called Data Power, which included many papers based on empirical studies of data’s power in specific context. The conference programme can be found here: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/socstudies/datapower/programme.
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Kennedy, H. (2016). Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary. In: Post, Mine, Repeat. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-35398-6_1
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