Thursday, February 21, 2013

Growing Critique of 'Big Data'

It is interesting that we can already see critique against the 'big data' movement (just search for critique of 'big data'). One good example of the more recent voices came in NYT the other day (link).  It is always the case that anything that evolves into a buzz word and get hyped inevitably will face critique, but this critique has come earlier than I expected.

It seems as if the notion of 'big data' and its proponents will face some resistance from the start. Of course, 'big data' has been around for a long time but it has been invisible and not very 'cool'. It has been seen as number crunching and serious computation of large datasets or databases. It has been seen as an activity in the background and as an infrastructure that feeds information into front-end systems. Now 'big data' is its own thing, bringing promises and creating hopes of new possibilities. With the new popularity and the promises of potential wonders that it can deliver, it will be interesting to see how the 'big data movement' will be able to handle the hype and the growing critique at the same time. 

1 comment:

Chung-Ching said...

Interesting angle of big data, from Mary Gray

Anthropology as BIG DATA: Making the case for ethnography as a critical dimension in media and technology studies

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=155639