Too much information

"Social networking, transparency, exposure, confession, surveillance, Big Data - we live in a time when the flows of information of all kinds have never been freer or more voluminous. (By 2020, to cite almost numbingly meaningless numbers, there will be forty zettabytes of digitally produced data, or roughly 5200 gigabytes for each person on the planet.) Much of that information is about us: you, me our neighbors, our fellow citizens. And much of that information ends up, often without our knowing it, in the hands or data banks of corporations, governments agencies, criminal gangs, or simply interested (and sometimes malicious) others.

Using this data - Big Data, as it's so ominously called - companies and governments are able to create virtual versions of each and every one of us. These algorithmic selves (..) are in turn used not simply to anticipate our longings and cater to our needs, but even to shape and reinforce our behaviors and beliefs.

Are we concerned about this? A little, but not much. Certainly not enough to change our ways - or even demand that powerful organizations change theirs. The benefits of connectedness, efficiency, and instant access to information are powerful inducements to accepting an ever-more networked status quo. And the age-old need to confess to even the darker aspects our private lives has become more compulsive, if differently motivated, in our tell-all times.

Yet there are good reasons to question our complicity in a networked world of 360-degree transparency, and to think more critically about how the "cryptopticon" (this voluntaristic surveillance regime) may be shaping our selves and our culture in ways that are less benign. "What if confessional culture is simply an avenue for turning the surveillance society inside out?" asks historian Sarah Igo. And what if both lead to the decline of the very agency, creativity, and individuality that we thought our information-rich, networked reality was going to support?"

The Hedgehog Review. Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, Spring 2015, p. 17.

Um bom resumo da minha investigação para o doutoramento.