Events
50th Anniversary Seminar Series – Public Talk by Prof. Scott Lash
13 Mar 2015
10:30am – 12:00nn
NAH313 (C-Centre)
Prof. Scott Lash (Visiting Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Interested parties please register at http://ebooking.com.cuhk.edu.hk/events/
For enquiries, please send email to manlokchan@cuhk.edu.hk
What is ‘big data’. What indeed is data? Data would seem to consist of facts. But what are facts? For Emile Durkheim and sociology a ‘social fact’ is, not something about society but a thing that is constituted by the social. But what are facts of experience, of not positivism but instead raw empiricism? If it is not recorded, then it is not a fact. Facts from the French ‘fait’, are ‘made’. ‘Data’ also from the French are donnėes: they are ‘given’. But who or what gives data? Data in everyday life are given by media. They are machine-mediated facts. Data and big data are media facts. They are computed by algorithms in data-bases. Hannah Arendt gives us a politics based in the data of experience. This politics leads to a public sphere very much the opposite of Habermas’s. But what is political experience in an age of big data? When machine-based algorithms determine the data we encounter? With CCTV media when we are recorded by no one at all.
