Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Kenneth... Information Polity 19 (2014) 157­160 DOI 10.3233/IP-140322 IOS Press Review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, London: John Murray, 2013. Big data is stirring a lot of buzz in academic, policy, and business debates. Even though the label is far from being unanimously accepted (size can hardly define the value of anything), it is difficult to find indifferent positions in this debate. Big data is used as shorthand for the vast amounts of transactional records that our daily use of digital technologies and online networks generate. As with the proverbial glass being half empty or half full, many see the promise of big data with optimistic or pessimistic eyes. Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger's book takes the stance that it is half full ­ actually, close to overflowing: big data, they argue, is pushing for a change of mindset of revolutionary consequences. What does this revolutionary change consist of? The biggest transformation, the authors claim, is of an epistemological sort: big data is making us stop `obsessing' (sic) about causation and start embracing correlations as our best approximation to the world. This change, they argue, has http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Information Polity IOS Press

Review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Information Polity , Volume 19 (1) – Jan 1, 2014
Download PDF
4 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/ios-press/review-of-big-data-a-revolution-that-will-transform-how-we-live-work-myWPt00P1Z
Publisher
IOS Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by IOS Press, Inc
ISSN
1570-1255
eISSN
1875-8754
DOI
10.3233/IP-140322
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Information Polity 19 (2014) 157­160 DOI 10.3233/IP-140322 IOS Press Review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, London: John Murray, 2013. Big data is stirring a lot of buzz in academic, policy, and business debates. Even though the label is far from being unanimously accepted (size can hardly define the value of anything), it is difficult to find indifferent positions in this debate. Big data is used as shorthand for the vast amounts of transactional records that our daily use of digital technologies and online networks generate. As with the proverbial glass being half empty or half full, many see the promise of big data with optimistic or pessimistic eyes. Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger's book takes the stance that it is half full ­ actually, close to overflowing: big data, they argue, is pushing for a change of mindset of revolutionary consequences. What does this revolutionary change consist of? The biggest transformation, the authors claim, is of an epistemological sort: big data is making us stop `obsessing' (sic) about causation and start embracing correlations as our best approximation to the world. This change, they argue, has

Journal

Information Polity – IOS Press

Published: Jan 1, 2014

There are no references for this article.