Big Data Politics

It will be very astonishing to confront netizens with the fact that everything they do on the Internet — web surfing, listening to music, watching multimedia etc., is under surveillance; “The Big Brother is watching”. The fact here connotes that the data of their preferences are being recorded and manipulated in one way or the other and they are being commodified on the basis of their respective preferences of material resource and services they choose.

As we all know, data is the new currency. You can monetise it and exhaust implications and if one is smart enough, they can identify the upcoming trends in the market. How appealing, isn’t it?

What is Big Data?

The term “big data” refers to massive information that is large, has complex structures and is difficult to process using the traditional methods. This could be sourced from a wide variety of sources. It could be identified from various aspects, ranging from individual consumer preferences, demographic employment structures, major market trends styles, to cosmopolitan attitudes, electoral preferences etc.

The concept gained momentum around the late 2000s and has helped to analyse the developing world more strategically by determining root causes of failures, issues and defects in near-real time, recalculating entire risk portfolios within minutes, and detecting fraudulent behaviour before it affects the organization, among others.

There are three vital V’s that makes up the foundational attributes of big data

• Volume: The huge amounts of data being stored.
• Velocity: The lightning speed at which data streams must be processed and analyzed.
• Variety: The different sources and forms from which data is collected, such as numbers, text, video, images, audio and text.

Regardless of how it is classified, data is everywhere. Our phones, credit cards, software applications, vehicles, records, websites, in fact the majority of “things” in the world are capable of transmitting vast amounts of data, and this information is highly valuable. In contemporary times, big data is used in every industry to identify the prevailing patterns and trends, answer questions, tackle complex problems and gain instinctive insights into customers. Companies and organizations use the information for a multitude of reasons like — understanding their customer base, growing their businesses, enhancing research, making forecasts and targeting key audiences for advertising. This is the moment when Big Data is politicised. This particular factor has been altering the dimensions of civil life. It has become a tool of manipulation, authoritative control and is rapidly changing the social world.

In this golden age of data — there’s more information available than ever before, and mobile access has given businesses an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of even the most isolated communities. Obviously, this data has been a boon for both companies and their customers, allowing access to products that once seemed impossibly out of reach.

It will be quite factual to acknowledge that this data can also have psephological implications — you can know one’s electoral preferences, upcoming job trends, which sector will be seeing a turnover, what is the demographic of the population engaged with internet and social media services, what type of content they enjoy, etc.

These large amounts of data, when fed into a computer, can decipher the possible future outcome and can take us to presumably different idioms, different dictions and tonalities; and new ideas, places, and classes, where it had not reached before. This has spawned some critical concerns.

It is then recognised as a collective-cum-individual problem, when this huge amount of personal data is sold to corporate clients. Yet, we only start panicking when we see how the illegal, or barely legal trade of our very life patterns collected by social networks impacts our socio-political choices. It is indeed a major problem.

A major instance of this happened back in 2016, when the Trump administration illicitly obtained Facebook data, and used it in ways to analyse the electoral situations and overturn the swing votes using various methods, stooping down to a new low. This showed the world how drastically one’s data can be used to make electoral wins by involving psychological manipulation and other advertising techniques.

The spontaneous transformation of algorithm analysis is very appreciable, as it brings with it ease of doing work. However, its open end argument is very critical to one’s right to privacy (privacy invasion, data capturing, using data samples for consumerism promotion). It is then that we realise this data has much more than just a “one-shot” value.

The burgeoning data and innovative data process methods facilitate answering inherently complex questions about society by offering new ways to organise concepts from data, to do descriptive-causal inferences, and to generate predictions. However, at the same time, they also pose challenges, and one must grasp the meaning of the concepts and predictions generated by convoluted algorithms, weigh the relative value of prediction versus causal inference, and cope with ethical challenges in their methods. We have to be very conscious to acknowledge that as the practices of data collection evolve, this is an important component for defining the future.