{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","uuid":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"digitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","isbns":["2021022153","9781032119182","9781032119205","9781003222149","2405518376"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":343,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":180,"pdf_page":194,"physical_index":194,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0b5ea8fb9e4c88f029b31a9f34cad7d59e55b1d686610aef032a6bd02aeada67"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"These developments are not limited to the United Kingdom. In the EU Horizon 2020 Work Programme for 2016–2017, social science calls “Europe in a Changing World – Inclusive, Innovative and Reflective Societies”, data, big data, and open data were key buzzwords. For example, the funding line “Policy-development in the age of big data” invites submissions of projects that focus on “using data analytics to generate new insights, increasing predictive power, and identifying unexpected patterns and relationships that can help inform policy making”. The Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities’s Digging into Data Challenge is a partnership of 18 research councils in the following 12 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It funds international projects that focus on developing new “techniques of large-scale digital data analysis”,<sup>6</sup> using modelling and simulation techniques and combining multiple data sources. Such funding initiatives privilege quantitative, computational approaches over qualitative, interpretative ones.\n\nBig data analytics’ trouble is that it often does not connect statistical and computational research results to a broader analysis of human meanings, interpretations, experiences, attitudes, moral values, ethical dilemmas, uses, contradictions, and macro-sociological implications of social media. There is a danger that a de-emphasis of philosophy, theory, critique, and qualitative analysis advances what Paul Lazarsfeld (2004 [1941]) termed administrative research, research that is predominantly concerned with how to make technologies and administration more efficient and effective. Paraphrasing Jürgen Habermas (1971), we can say that there is a danger that digital positivism advances an “absolutism of pure [digital, quantitative] methodology” (p. 5), forgets about academia’s educational role, falls short of fully understanding “the meaning of knowledge” (p. 69) in the information society at large, and is an “immunization of the [Internet] sciences against philosophy” (p. 67).\n\nVincent Mosco (2014, 2016) calls the ideology of big data analytics “digital positivism” and “cloud sublime”. Big data is “a myth, a sublime story about conjuring wisdom not from the flawed intelligence of humans, with all of our well-known limitations, but from the pure data stored in the cloud” (Mosco 2014, 193). The “hot new profession of data scientist knows only quantitative approaches” (Mosco 2014, 197). Digital positivism’s limit is that it remains stuck in the narrowness of the Lasswell formula, focusing its research on the following question: who communicates what to whom on social media with what effects? It forgets users’ subjectivity, experiences, norms, values, and interpretations, as well as the embeddedness of the media into society’s power structures and social struggles. We need a paradigm shift from administrative digital positivist big data analytics towards critical social media research. Critical social media research combines the critical social media theory, critical digital methods, and critical-realist social media research ethics.\n\n180\n\nThemes\n\n5 http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/research/fundedthemesandprogrammes/themes/digitaltransformations/bigdata/\n\n6 http://diggingintodata.org/file/1036/download?token=fqylXiET","previous_page":179,"next_page":181}