“Culture” in the Science Fictional Universe of “Big Data” / Robert Albro

The turn to “big data” represents a potentially exciting set of developments along multiple frontiers of advanced supercomputing, new software tools, other information collection technologies such as GIS, database management systems, and massive data sets, such as the exponentially expanding corpus of information generated by Web 2.0 social media. Government funding has followed a corporate lead, where in recent years the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon have turned a pursuit of “big data” into a major business proposition focused on gathering increasingly nuanced information aboutconsumer behavior to better service and target customers. Making sense of the implications of all this will preoccupy us for some time.
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