Data Enlightenment and its Discontents: Free Will and Myth of Human Authority in the Age of Big Data
Stavroula Anastasia Katsorchi
Publication: Volume 4 Issue 2
Abstract |New technologies of data-extraction, such as Big Data, collect information from online users and connect them in order to trace behavioural patterns and predict future marketing choices. Online activity is becoming more essential than ever before despite growing concerns about privacy. Personalised advertisements based on prediction not only manipulate online users, but they even create their needs and desires by influencing their decision-making process and choices, thus, facilitating the growth of online capitalism. Is there even a small place for human free will in the age of Big Data? This paper examines the possibility for agency as it is framed in the age of Big Data, and contends that although technology is the offspring of humanity’s alleged scientific rationality, it paradoxically questions the myth of man’s mastery over himself and the world. By exposing humankind’s self-contradictions and vulnerability to control, Big Data dismantles and simultaneously continues anthropocentric myths regarding human reason and supremacy, while promoting new forms of surveillance and state control.
Keywords | Big Data, Agency, Free Will, Technology, Data-Mining, Surveillance, Digital Panopticon, Online Capitalism, Enlightenment
Stavroula Anastasia Katsorchi (linakat94@yahoo.com) is a PhD candidate at the University of Athens, Greece. She holds an MA in English Literature, Culture, and Theory from the University of Sussex, UK. Her PhD thesis focuses on posthuman feminist theory and Anglophone dystopian fiction. Her other research interests include ecocriticism, film theory, cultural criticism, and modernist fiction. Apart from her numerous academic paper presentations, she has published two poetry collections as well.