My starting point for this blog was Deborah Lupton’s ‘The 13 P’s of big data’, but understanding this, I had to go back to the beginning and understand what ‘Big Data’ actually means.
As a child of the Seventies, we saw the rapid development of computing and the introduction and evolution of home computers. Beyond learning how computers worked and an overwhelming sense of fear of not wanting to do something wrong and break it, we did not comprehend where this would all lead and the data that could and would be collected. To growing economies, data has been referred to as the new oil, to a layperson like myself is sometimes hard to comprehend the real value of data as it seems so intangible, unlike oil, gold, gems or cash.
Big Data is described as the 3 V’s - volume, variety and velocity. An example of this in today’s world, is the current pandemic; we are using QR Codes to move around our home towns and cities, and by doing this, we are contributing our movement data to support and inform contact tracing. This gives us a massive volume of data (number of people and places visited), a wide variety of data collected (patterns and behaviour of people travelling to and from various locations) and velocity of the data (the speed at which this data has created and compiled).
Now that we have a better understanding of what big data is, we can go back to discussing Deborah Lupton’s 13 P’s and possibly why she has come up with her own spin on this to create her own schema. In essence, it is Lupton’s way of presenting her own ideas on big data, with the inclusion of adding new dimensions. One such new dimension is socio-cultural angles, to pave the way to open the conversation to the often referred to as dry and binary matter of data. Lupton brings a depth of personal, emotional, social and political implications to data that from the onset many may not have considered.
Recently published studies have been highlighting the social impact on body image concerns in young women. Nowhere are these socio-cultural impacts of big data and AI felt more than on social networking sites (SNS) - Instagram and Facebook. Articles this week focused on these SNS keeping their internal research hidden for the past 2 years. Whilst earlier research were on smaller cohorts, this new revelation shows utilisation of the organisation’s internal big data, revealing the impact was larger than anticipated with 1 in 3 girls in the US and UK affected with low self-esteem and body image.
We know that algorithms can and are ‘created’ (tweaked) to create an outcome or output that we want, supporting the notion that by nature, algorithms are discriminative. But, by tweaking these outputs is thus robbing us of alternate futures and possibly shifting the distribution of power. These particular SNS algorithms are tailored to targeted showing of images that the users will be subjected to and interact with. Creating, in this case the perfect storm of constant SNS feeds of body image perfect influencers, product sales and advertising revenue.
Understanding the ethics or moral code of the binary applications of algorithms and how they have the potential to gently mould us in a way we may yet to comprehend, is increasingly necessary. Governments are investigating and drafting legislation for online safety which is thought to impose a duty of care for social media companies. Today data is captured continuously throughout our daily life; these offer opportunities for influence on how we potentially view our world and spend money.
