Swimming or drowning in the data ocean? Thoughts on the metaphors of big data

English: Tsunami hazard sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is no doubt that there is a current fascination in both popular culture and academic research with big data – the vast quantities of data that are generated from people’s interactions with digital technologies. The term ‘big data’ is appearing with ever-greater frequency in the popular media, government reports, blogs and academic journals and conferences.

The ways in which big digital data are described rhetorically reveal much about their contemporary social and cultural meanings. As Sue Thomas writes in her book Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace, organic metaphors drawn from the natural world have been continually used to describe computer technologies since their emergence. Such natural terms as the web, the cloud, bug, virus, root, mouse and spider have all been employed in attempting to conceptualise and describe these technologies. These metaphors work to render digital technologies more ‘natural’, and therefore as less threatening and alienating. However nature is not always benign: it may sometimes be wild, chaotic and threatening, and these meanings of nature may also be bestowed upon digital technologies.

By far the most commonly employed metaphors to discuss big data are those related to water or liquidity: streams, flows, leaks, rivers, oceans, seas, waves and so on. Both academic and popular cultural descriptions of big data have frequently referred to the ‘fire hose’ of data issuing from a social media site such as Twitter and the data ‘deluge’, ‘flood’ or ‘tsunami’ that as internet users we both contribute to and which threaten to ‘swamp’ or ‘drown us’. These rather vivid descriptions of data as a fluid, uncontrollable entity possessing great physical power emphasise the sheer volume and fast nature of digital data movements, as well as their unpredictability and the difficulty of control and containment. They suggest an economy of digital data and surveillance in which data are collected constantly and move from site to site in ways that cannot easily themselves be monitored, measured or regulated.

Other metaphors are sometimes employed to describe the by-product data that are generated include data ‘trails’, ‘breadcrumbs’, ‘exhausts’, ‘smoke signals’, ‘shadows’. All these tend to suggest the notion of data as objects that are left behind as tiny elements of another activity or entity (‘trails’, ‘breadcrumbs’, ‘exhausts’), or as less material derivatives of the phenomena from which they are viewed to originate (‘smoke signals’, ‘shadows’).

Digital data are also often referred as living things, as having a kind of vitality in their ability to move from site to site and morph into different forms. The rhizome metaphor is sometimes employed to describe how digital data flow from place to place, or from node to node, suggesting that they are part of a living organism such as a plant. This also suggests a high level of complexity and a network of interconnected tubes and nodes.

The focus on liquidity, ceaseless movement and flux and vitality, while accurately articulating the networked nature of contemporary societies and the speed and ease at which information travels across the networks, also tends to obscure certain dimensions of digitisation. The blockages and resistances, the solidities that may impede the fluid circulation of data tend to be left out of such discussions. The rhetoric of free streams of flowing communication tends to obscure the politics and power relations behind digital and other information technologies. The continuing social disadvantage and lack of access to economic resources (including the latest digital devices and data download facilities) that many people experience belies the discourse of free-flowing digital data and universal, globalised access to and sharing of these data.

Liquidity metaphors evoke the notion of an overwhelming volume of data that must somehow be dealt with, managed and turned to good use. Instead of ‘surfing the net’, a term that was once frequently used to denote moving from website to website easily and playfully, we now must cope with huge waves of information or data that threaten to engulf us. When we think of digital data as ‘breadcrumbs’ or ‘shadows’, they are less overtly threatening, but are also depicted as subtle means of tracking and tracing our movements and activities. As we grow increasingly aware of the use of digital data for surveillance and espionage purposes, these metaphors may take on a more malign meaning, suggesting that we are being monitored constantly whether we agree or not. Digital data surveillance systems are beginning to know more about us than we ourselves do in their capacity to silently watch and record our actions. When we conceptualise digital data and the systems that produce them as complex living organisms, they appear more benign, part of ‘good nature’, but also again as potentially wild and uncontained, growing out of our control.

What the rhetoric of big data tends to suggest is that we harbour both attraction towards and fear about this phenomenon. Big data may offer many benefits, but they also generate anxieties due to their volume, power, ceaseless movement, complexity, mystery and ability to generate knowledge about us that we may not want others to see.

For more on the social and cultural aspects of big data see my Bundlr ‘The Social Life of Big Data and Algorithms’.

The academic quantified self

Last week I put together two abstracts for the British Sociological Association’s conference next year. One abstract is for a panel on digital public sociology and the other is for a workshop on the quantified self. In the digital public sociology abstract I refer to the need to take a critical sociological perspective on engaging in public sociology using digital tools. In the abstract on the quantified self, I focus on the conditions that have come together to make the quantified self assemblage possible.

As I was thinking about what I wanted to discuss in these papers, it struck me that there are strong connections between the two. Engaging as a public sociologist using digital media invariably involves some form of quantifying the self. Roger Burrows has employed the term ‘metric assemblage’ to describe the ways in which academics have become monitored and measured in the contemporary audit culture of the modern academy. As part of configuring our metric assemblages, we are quantifying our professional selves.

Academics have been counting elements of their work for a long time as part of their professional practice and presentation of the self, even before the advent of digital technologies. The ‘publish or perish’ maxim refers to the imperative for a successful academic to constantly produce materials such as books, book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles in order to maintain their reputation and place in the academic hierarchy. Academic curricula vitae invariably involve lists of these outputs under the appropriate headings, as do university webpages for academics. They are required for applications for promotions, new positions and research funding.

These quantified measures of output are our ‘small data’: the detailed data that we collect on ourselves. Universities too engage in regular monitoring and measuring practices of the work of their academics and their own prestige in academic rankings and assessment of the quality and quantity of the research output of their departments. They therefore participate in the aggregation of data, producing ‘big data’ sets. The advent of digital media, including the use of these media as part of engaging in public sociology, has resulted in more detailed and varied forms of data being created and collected. Sociologists using digital media have ever greater opportunities to quantify their output and impact in the form of likes, retweets, views of their blogs, followers and so on. We now have Google Scholar, Scopus or Web of Science to monitor and display how often our publications have been cited, where and by whom, and to automatically calculate our h-indices. Academic journals, now all online, show how often researchers’ articles have been read and downloaded, and provide lists of the most cited and most downloaded articles they have published.

In adopting a critical reflexive approach to all this monitoring and measurement, we need to ask questions. Should the practices of quantifying the academic self be considered repressive of academic freedom and autonomy? Do they place undue stress on academics to perform, and perhaps to produce work that is sub-standard but greater in number? However it is also important to consider the undeniable positive dimensions of participating in digital public engagement and thereby reaching a wider audience. Academics do not write for themselves alone: being able to present their work to more readers has its own rewards. Quantified selfers can find great satisfaction in using data to take control over elements of their lives and also as a performative aspect. So too, for academics, collecting and presenting data on their professional selves can engender feelings of achievement, satisfaction and pride at their accomplishments. Such data are important to the academic professional sense of self.

As I argued in my abstract for the digital public sociology panel, as sociologists we need to stand back and take a reflexive perspective on these developments in academic life: not simply to condemn them but also to acknowledge their contribution to the ‘making up’ of academic selves. We should be alert to both the pleasures and the privations of academic self-quantification.

See here for my blog posts on using digital media as an academic and here for my other posts on the quantified self.

The body-being-born: how women conceptualise and experience the moment of birth

Newborn child, seconds after birth. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although there is a large body of literature about labour and childbirth in the social sciences, surprising few researchers have sought to investigate women’s experiences of the moment of birth.

Virginia Schmied and I recently published an article in the Sociology of Health & Illness that drew on interview data with Australian women who had recently given birth. We asked women to recount their birth stories to us, and the data that eventuated gave interesting insights into women’s perceptions and experiences of what we call ‘the body-being-born’. We use this term to refer to the foetus/infant, an ambiguous body at the moment of birth because it is not quite inside but not quite outside the maternal body. When inside the maternal body, this body is technically a foetus; once expelled from the maternal body, it is called an infant. But in the process of vaginal labour and birth itself, when the body-being-born is passing through the cervix, parts of this body (most commonly its head) slip inside and outside the maternal body, moving back and forth as the woman works to deliver the body.

This stage of labour, therefore, is a highly liminal one, involving the two-in-one foetal/maternal body in the process of individuating to become two separate bodies over a period of time.  Women who gave birth vaginally without anaesthetic often described this process as a ‘splitting’ of their bodies, a sensation of their bodies ‘opening to the world’ over which they had no control.

We found that most of the women we interviewed struggled to conceptualise this process, as it was so foreign to their embodied experiences. They also needed to take some time following the birth to come to terms with the idea that the foetus was now ‘my baby’: a body/self that was physically separate from their own, now foreign and strange as it was outside their bodies. As one of our interviewees put it:

The midwife handed her straight to me and I held her, but I had held her for a while, I just was — it was like looking at her and wondering ‘Where did this baby came from?’ You know, despite what I’d gone through, it was hard to associate that she was actually mine and she was out of my stomach … Even holding her for the first few minutes — just, it wasn’t like she was mine, my kid, which is weird …when you think of what you went through, it was really quite strange.

This is a time in which women have to deal physically and emotionally with the disrupted boundaries of their bodies, the significant distortion and opening that has occurred with the birth and the splitting of body/self. There is a sense of disbelief, of wonder that this amazing, unique and strange process has happened to them.

An important finding from our study was that women who had undergone a caesarean section had even greater difficulties coming to terms emotionally and conceptually with the notion that their infant was now separate from them; that they had, indeed, ‘had a baby’. Because they did not undergo the physical rigours and often intense pain of prolonged labour and the experience of actually expelling the body-being-born from their own bodies, and because their bodies were numbed to surgically deliver, women who had had a caesarean took longer to accept the fact that the infant was now out of their bodies. They talked about feeling alienated from their infants and struggling to come to terms that it was actually ‘my baby’. In the words of another of our interviewees:

It was very hard to think that she was my daughter after she was born, because I had a caesarean under general anaesthetic and all of a sudden I’m not pregnant any more. And I wake up a few hours later and you’re presented with a baby. You think, ‘Oh, why isn’t this, why aren’t I feeling any kicks in my abdomen anymore?’ — you know. And there’s the baby and it’s very hard to relate to it.

Virginia and I conclude our article by arguing that the circumstances in which women give birth are pivotal to how they experience the process of coming to terms with the body that was once inside them emerging to the outside. Our findings suggest that health professionals and attendants working with women in labour and childbirth need to allow not only for the physical and the emotional but also the ontological dimensions of how a woman experiences both her own body and that of the body-being-born, and the significant difference that undergoing a caesarean section can make to the woman being able to achieve the transition from two bodies in one to two separate bodies successfully.