The Internet With A Human Face
Love this assertion the speaker makes: very often data is just a mirror, it reflects whatever assumptions we bring to it.
The belief in Big Data turns out to be true, although in an unexpected way. If you collect enough data, you really can find anything you want.
This is a graph from Tyler Vingen's lovely website, which been making the rounds lately. This one shows the relationship between suicides by hanging and the number of lawyers in North Carolina. There are lots of other examples to choose from. There's a 0.993 correlation here. You could publish it in an academic journal! Perhaps that process could be automated. You can even imagine stories that could account for that bump in the middle of the graph. Maybe there was a rope shortage for a few weeks? 'Big data' has this intoxicating effect. We start collecting it out of fear, but then it seduces us into thinking that it will give us power. In the end, it's just a mirror, reflecting whatever assumptions we approach it with. But collecting it drives this dynamic of relentless surveillance.