Data is the new ________. (Fill with a term that represents dominant beliefs about data.)
Turn to a neighbor and discuss:
What assumptions are built into this metaphor?
What are the some social consequences of associating data with this idea?
What did we learn about epistemology on Wednesday? How is this relevant to big data?
Discourse
How we communicate or converse about topics, people, and things
Dominant discourse characterizes the discourses that emerge as predominant throughout society
Shapes our values, identities, behaviors, and interactions with each other
Also shapes, disseminates, and is prodded by our ideologies, or worldviews
Cultural hegemony describes when our ideologies reflect those with power over us
What social institutions shape predominant ways we talk about things?
What are some examples of dominant discourse?
Technology Discourse
Technocratic: Technology will fix social problems.
Computers will save the world!
Other examples?
Dystopian: Technology is frightening or debilitating.
Robots will take over all jobs.
Other examples?
Determinist: Technology determines how society operates.
Mobile phones are making us anti-social.
Other examples?
Discourse Analysis in Nine Steps
Establish the context
Consider the medium
Discern the intended audience
Assess assumptions
Identify cultural cues and references
Evaluate rhetorical strategies and methods of delivery
Consider the social structures the discourse operates within
Assess how the discourse disseminates
Reflect on what is not said or who is not included
Reading Discussion
Pull out a piece of paper, and draw a line down the center. On the left side, list adjectives that people use to describe “good” data. On the right side, write the opposite of each word you wrote on the left side.
Turn to your neighbor and discuss:
What data discourses are the words you wrote on the left side embedded within?
Can you identify any terms that might fit in between these opposites?
Binary Oppositions
Looking at the world through pairs of terms that we consider to have the opposite meaning
Examples include:
Real/fake
Objective/subjective
Nature/culture
Binary oppositions are reductionist, or oversimplify complexity
Binary oppositions are rooted in ideologies and disseminated through discourse
Hierarchies in Binary Oppositions
In dominant discourse, one half of a binary opposition tends to be positioned as superior than the other
One half tends to get treated as normal or pure, and other as a deviation from the normal, or tainted
Binary oppositions can reinforce privilege
What are some examples of some hiearchical binary oppositions?
Nature/Culture
Countless domains (disciplines, newspaper headings, etc.) organized around the divisions between nature and culture
Nature is often associated with purity, innateness, biology, or rawness.
Culture is seen as ‘Other’ to what is natural
e.g. human judgments bias science and decision-making
e.g. human cultures destroy the Earth’s purity
Feminist critiques:
Shows how purity is political
Argues that we can’t tell where nature stops and culture starts
Shows how the divisions justify treating certain social groups as superior and others as inferior
Refers to natureculture: hybrids reverse the logic of binary oppositions
What are some of the discursive risks of talking about raw data?