What is most interesting to me about Big Data is the amount of speculation involved. As described in lecture, Big Data is not about tracking your piracy actions, but about predicting the likelihood of you being a pirate. Big Data is just not about tracking your consumer actions, but also about predicting what your consumer actions will be based on other information, and encouraging you toward those actions. As Rita Raley details, “Speculation lurks here in the incalculable, the size of data storage exceeding conventional metrics and simply open to an unknowable future. Thus it is necessarily the case that data markets should be speculative, their units of exchange not even stabilized as such, and driven by techniques of ‘predictive optimization’ that attempt to generate future value.” (124) For example, something like online behavioral advertising “produces a dynamic, flexible, and perfectly customized audience, constituted by the microtargeting of the intents and interests of consumers on a massive scale.” (122) The degree to which speculation is involved in data interpretation is understandable, but also somewhat disturbing. Data interpretation reads the individual as “flecks of identity” and makes predictions off of this. Raley: “Data is in this respect performative: the composition of flecks and bits of data into a profile of a terror suspect, the re-grounding of abstract data in the targeting of actual live, will have the effect of producing that life, that body, as a terror suspect.” (128) This leads me to question the implications of big data and continue to ask what are the possible effects of these procedures, positive and negative?
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