Big Data: A New Medium?

Big data architectures are increasingly determining classificatory systems in the social, educational, and healthcare realms transforming political questions into technical management. Data, and their multiple arborisations have become new epistemic landscapes. They have also become new existential terrains. While there’s been considerable critique of datification fuelled by corporate interests and algorithmic governmentality, a more fundamental question is: can big data be seen as a new medium, the way photography or film were when they first appeared?

No new medium is ever truly new. It’s always remediation of older media. What is new is the medium’s re-articulation of the difference between here and there, before and after, yours and mine, knowable and unknowable, possible and impossible. This transdisciplinary volume brings together voices from cultural and media theory, art, philosophy, history, and political philosophy to examine how the socio-technical process called big data patterns knowledge and time; how it patterns use and extraction; cultural heritage, memory; and, finally: people.