Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies

Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Because big data renders quantifiable what we think of as social, it helps propel the project of modernity, which strives for knowledge, progress, better services, and more comfortable lives. Data Love argues that the dark side of data mining cannot be confined to tensions between citizens and government: the phenomenon has instigated a transfiguration of society, one in which we are all involved. Big data has sparked a silent revolution, initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms. Unfolding at the heart of consumer culture, this revolution has led to a worrisome loss of self, an erosion of memory, and an abandonment of social utopias. Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who—out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion—contribute to the amassing of evermore data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present.

About the Author :
Roberto Simanowski is professor of digital media studies and digital humanities in the English and Creative Media Departments at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author and editor of several books, including Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (2011) and Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching (2010).

Review :
Compelling.... Simanowski makes an excellent case that the most essential struggle is not with the NSA or Facebook but with ourselves.--Jennifer Howard "Times Literary Supplement" Recommended.-- "Choice" Digital interactive space is not only a technical condition: it mobilizes larger ecologies of meaning that cannot be captured by an exclusive focus on those technical features. Roberto Simanowski gives us a brilliant exploration of one such ecology, an ironic and critical take on contemporary society's ambivalent relationship with data.--Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions Simanowski proffers a much more profound history and theoretical basis to the debate, a contribution unparalleled in its findings and with conclusions that are neither too radical nor too conservative. Without question, Data Love is the most comprehensive and philosophically rich contribution on this subject that I have read.--Creston Davis, Global Center for Advanced Studies With the advent of the Web, digital technologies seem to contain alternatives to the consumerist models implemented by the culture industry as described by Adorno and Hockheimer. Simanowski shows how data economy turns this dream into a nightmare of hyperconsumption founded on hypercontrol.--Bernard Stiegler, author of States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century With this book, Simanowski joins Evgeny Morozov as an indispensable critic of our obsession with big data. What sets Data Love apart from other accounts is its determined shift of attention away from the sinister machinations of government agencies to the impact of seemingly harmless commercial data-service providers, as well as its informed historical focus, which ties modern data mining to the venerable project of enlightenment. Seek and you will find, a famous text promised two millennia ago. Search engines such as Google have renewed the pledge, but Simanowski leaves no doubt that the digital platform supporting this promise is turning it into a threat: Seek and you will be found.--Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, author of Kittler and the Media