594870

research-article2015

MCS0010.1177/0163443715594870Media, Culture & SocietyPunathambekar and Kavada

Crosscurrents Special Section Editorial

Debating Big Data

Media, Culture & Society

2015, Vol. 37(7) 10761077
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0163443715594870
mcs.sagepub.com

Aswin Punathambekar
University of Michigan, USA

Anastasia Kavada

University of Westminster, UK

Keywords
Big Data, Knowledge, Context, Ethics, Access

Big Data has become a flashpoint in conversations in a range of disciplines across the
humanities and social sciences. As advances in computational methods expand the terrain of the measurable, the identifiable, and the knowable, they also raise thorny questions around the politics and ethics of academic research. In an era marked by the
thoroughgoing digitalization of virtually every domain of our lives, changes in how
information about human behavior is gathered, circulated, and made sense of both unsettles and reinforces existing power dynamics.
This Special Crosscurrents Issue aims to spark a debate on Big Data from the disciplinary location of media and communication studies and more specifically, the emergent field of digital media studies. Our starting point is danah boyd and Kate Crawfords
(2011) important article, Critical questions for Big Data, in which they reflect on what
all this data means, who gets access to what data, how data analysis is deployed, and to
what ends (p. 3). We asked our contributors to draw on their own research on different
aspects of digital and global media as a way to respond to one of more of the issues that
boyd and Crawford identified the definition of knowledge, claims to objectivity and
accuracy, context and meaning-making, access to data, and ethics and accountability.
Moving well beyond the domain of social media, this collection of essays shows that
the story of Big Data is part of a long-standing debate about methods and approach in

Corresponding author:
Aswin Punathambekar, University of Michigan, 1225 South University Ave., #244, Ann Arbor, MI 481042523, USA.
Email: aswinp@umich.edu

Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com by guest on March 13, 2016

Punathambekar and Kavada

1077

media and communication studies. It is, as John Durham Peters (2001) has suggested,
about the politics of statistics and stories. In other words, the Big Data phenomenon
does present an opportunity to reflect on the allure of quantification. At the same time,
the examples and contexts that the essays here grapple with also encourage us to explore
how this particular mode of enumeration is, in fact, different from established strategies
for counting, classifying, archiving, and producing knowledge about people and places
around the world.
If boyd and Crawford were primarily interested in the implications that the Big Data
turn holds for academic research, the contributors to this Special Crosscurrents Issue cast
a wider net to include corporate research, state-supported Big Data projects, and crucially, new forms of collaboration between the academic and corporate worlds. To be
sure, academic researchers do grapple with a whole host of ethical questions concerning
data collection in digital environments regardless of whether we are referring to ethnographic accounts or a carefully selected set of tweets. And academic researchers can
contribute to shaping the ethics and policies surrounding Big Data research. But as Jack
Qiu points out in his contribution to this Special Issue, not only has the Big Data genie
moved beyond the realm of research universities, it has also moved beyond the West to
become a truly global presence. The essays here thus encourage us to frame the problem
of Big Data in relation to global issues of privacy, knowledge, power, and control.
We regard this Special Crosscurrents Issue as an opening salvo and would like to
invite other scholars to respond to these essays and add new questions and perspectives
on Big Data.
References
boyd d and Crawford K (2011) Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication &
Society 15(5): 662679.
Peters JD (2001) The only proper scale of representation: the politics of statistics and stories.
Political Communication 18(4): 433449.

Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com by guest on March 13, 2016