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Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment's quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.
List of contents
Preface
Part I. Beyond the NSA Debate
1. Intelligence Agency Logic
2. Double Indifference
3. Self-Tracking and Smart Things
4. Ecological Data Disaster
5. Cold Civil War
Part II. Paradigm Change
6. Data-Mining Business
7. Social Engineers Without a Cause
8. Silent Revolution
9. Algorithms
10. Absence of Theory
Part III. The Joy of Numbers
11. Compulsive Measuring
12. The Phenomenology of the Numerable
13. Digital Humanities
14. Lessing's Rejoinder
Part IV. Resistances
15. God's Eye
16. Data Hacks
17. On the Right Life in the Wrong One
Epilogue
Postface
Notes
Index
About the author
Roberto Simanowski (Prof. Dr. phil.) lehrt Medienwissenschaft an der Universität Basel. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Theorie, Geschichte, Ästhetik und Soziologie digitaler Medien, Intermedialität, Narrativität sowie Interkulturalität.
Summary
Data Love considers the changes big data has brought to the human condition from a philosophical standpoint. Roberto Simanowski explores our entanglements with algorithmic analysis and data mining, as we contribute to the amassing of ever more data about our lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of our selves.
Additional text
A splendid and beautiful book about our society, our relationship with technologies, but most important, governments' relationship with them. . . . Highly recommended to everyone.
Report
Digital interactive space is not only a technical condition: it mobilizes larger ecologies of meaning that cannot be captured by an exclusive focus on those technical features. Roberto Simanowski gives us a brilliant exploration of one such ecology, an ironic and critical take on contemporary society's ambivalent relationship with data. Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions
