Is There More To The Story?
Imagine walking past an elementary school playground during recess. As you’re watching kids play, you see a boy in a blue shirt, Tommy, push a boy in a red shirt, George. Now, based on just this information, you’d think that Tommy is a bully, right? But, what if I told you that George pushed Tommy the day before? Or, what if there was a kickball flying in George’s direction and Tommy pushed George out of the way? My point is, without ALL of the information, it’s hard to form a complete, accurate opinion on something.
This is the future society is heading towards with big social media companies, like Google and Facebook. A future where the available information is limited based on what these big social media companies decide to show us.
According to danah boyd and Kate Crawford, authors of “Critical Questions For Big Data,” “Large data companies have no responsibility to make their data available, and they have total control over who gets to see them.” This creates a huge power imbalance between the employees of those companies and everyone else, as these big companies get to decide what data to make available, to who, when, for how much, etc.
This power imbalance will only continue to grow as these social media companies continue collecting huge quantities of data. For example, this is Facebook’s data storage facility currently under construction in Utah.
Facebook hasn’t said exactly how much data the upgraded facility will hold, but “experts estimate the highly secretive National Security Agency data center in Bluffdale, which has a similar footprint, might accommodate 3–12 exabytes of data.” (For reference 1 exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information). That is A LOT of data for Facebook to control.
As seen with George and Tommy, having access to all of the information is essential. And, if society continues to move in this direction, only the big social media companies will have access to all of that information. They will be the ones able to make accurate and informed decisions, while the rest of us are left to piece together the information that they choose to share.
We will be living in a world written by social media companies- relying on them to summarize paragraphs and chapters that we may never even get to read unless they decide to share it with us.
