Abstract
The controversy surrounding the way in which data was obtained and used by a private corporation, Cambridge Analytica, in connection with the US Presidential election of 2016 begs a series of questions and points to the critical connection between big data and a variety of fundamental human imperatives such as privacy and freedom of expression amongst others. This chapter uses the issues surrounding the controversy as a point of departure to explore two related issues – first the way in which the “technologically alienated” individual makes technological decisions without being mindful of the consequences of the technological choices and secondly the way in which the alienation can be utilized to obtain detailed information from the structured and unstructured data that makes up the gigantic corpus of big data.
TopIntroduction
The controversy surrounding the way in which data was obtained and used by a private corporation, Cambridge Analytica, in connection with the US Presidential election of 2016 begs a series of questions and points to the critical connection between Big Data and a variety of fundamental human imperatives such as privacy and freedom of expression amongst others (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison, 2018). This chapter uses the issues surrounding the controversy as a point of departure to explore two related issues – first the way in which the “technologically alienated” individual makes technological decisions without being mindful of the consequences of the technological choices and secondly the way in which the alienation can be utilized to obtain detailed information from the structured and unstructured data that makes up the gigantic corpus of Big Data.
The key to the controversy was the fact that a corporation was able to collect information from individuals in a manner where the people of whom data was collected felt that they were unaware of the fact that their data was being collected. What happens after that is important, but the goal of this essay is to examine the claim by individuals, and their representatives that the data collection happened in a surreptitious manner. While, this essay is not meant to condone what happened, but it is to offer an alternative argument that places a great deal of responsibility on individual users of digital systems. It is useful to consider the notion of alienation in this context.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Identity: The defining elements of an individual composed of items such as age, gender, race as well as the attitudes, opinions, and beliefs of a person.
Technological Alienation: Refers to the process where people get distanced from the technology that surrounds them and the tools that they use; the process has led to the development of a law of technological alienation: as technology gets more sophisticated the user perceives it as complicated and gets alienated from the technology ( Mitra, 2010 ).
Narbs: Narbs are little bits of narrative which exist as fragments of information that are almost meaningless in isolation. But when connected together those trace elements of the story produce an identity narrative of an individual (see www.narbs.info ).
Data Breach: A process where large amounts of private data, mostly about individuals, becomes illegally available to people who should not have access to the information.
Narrative: This is the technical term for a story. Humans are story-telling beings and stories offer a way to make sense of the World around us as well as get an understanding of the people who surround us.
Big Data: An increasingly popular term that refers to the large amount of digital data that is being accumulated about individuals, where the data is voluminous, collected at great velocity and extremely variegated in detail offering a nearly precise identity narrative of the individual.
Narrative Map: The maps are made up of specific nodes and connectors. The nodes represent attitudes, concepts, behaviors and different issues that people are talking about in their narbs. The map connects the nodal narbs to indicate how strongly nodes are related to each other.