Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies - Hardcover

Simanowski, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231177267 ISBN 13: 9780231177269

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment's quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.

Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who―out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion―contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present.

About this title

Book Description:

Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us. Roberto Simanowski explores the entanglements of those who contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development.

About the Author:

Roberto Simanowski is professor of digital media studies and digital humanities in the English and Creative Media Departments at the City University of Hong Kong. He is the author and editor of several books, including Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (2011) and Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching (2010).

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0231177267
• ISBN 13: 9780231177269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176