Surveillance-democracy

No one disputes that the collection of ‘Big Data’ holds the promise of interesting, even radically new, discoveries. But any critical social science of Big Data must take account of the broad transformations in communication and social organization that have generated the situation where Big Data is standardly available not just to corporations and states, but to researchers too. What if those transformations are potentially inimical, at some deeper level, to the very goals (for example, the sustaining of democratic politics) that may motivate much of our research in the first place? This short article seeks to raise some pertinent questions along these lines.