This book examines the influence of key films on public understanding of big data and the algorithmic systems that structure our digitally mediated lives.
From star-powered blockbusters to civic-minded documentaries positioned to facilitate weighty debates about artificial intelligence, these texts frame our discourse and mediate our relationship to technology. Above all, they impact society’s abilities to regulate AI and navigate big tech’s political and economic maneuvers to achieve market dominance and regulatory capture. Foregrounding data politics with close readings of key films like Moneyball, Minority Report, The Social Dilemma, and Coded Bias, Gerald Sim reveals compelling ways in which films and tech industry–adjacent media define apprehension of AI. With the mid-2010s techlash in danger of fizzling out, Screening Big Data explores the relationship between this resistance and cultural infrastructure while highlighting the urgent need to refocus attention onto how technocentric media occupy the public imagination.
This book will interest students and scholars of film and media studies, digital culture, critical data studies, and technopolitics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: How Cinema Maps the Algorithmic Imaginary 1. The Technopolitics of Big Data Documentaries 2. Moneyball: Data Platonism and Data Complaisance 3. Minority Report: A Missive from the Father of Ubiquitous Computing Conclusion: Algorithmic Literacy and You
About the Author :
Gerald Sim is a professor of film and media studies and I-SENSE Ethics Fellow at Florida Atlantic University, USA. He is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014) and Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (2020).
Review :
“Screening Big Data understands that developments in digital culture reach far beyond the technology — they are cultural phenomena with their own legends, heroes, and villains. The result is an invaluable and wide-ranging guide to the myths of big data and how these play out across our screens, large and small, shaping our understanding of the technology that is transforming our world. Gerald Sim's wide-ranging account provides invaluable insight into 'big data': that it is not enough to understand the technology, we need to understand the culture that has grown up around it.” - Mark Andrejevic, Professor, Monash University, Australia
“Drawing on an impressive plethora of sources, Screening Big Data unpacks the paradoxes within the data mythologies and cultural imaginaries that have come to shape our current techno-media-industrial complex. Rigorous yet highly engaging, this book is a must-read for media scholars, critical data researchers and anyone seeking to distill the capabilities and limitations of AI from the cinematic narratives that both capture our imagination and distort our understanding of techno-political systems.” - Neta Alexander, Assistant Professor, Yale University, USA
“The social power of data doesn’t come from data alone. In Screening Big Data, Gerald Sim takes us on a compelling tour through the cinematic landscape of technoscientific imagination, exploring how algorithms, artificial intelligence, and data science have been represented on screen. Sim shows how these representations shape our understanding of what these tools can do, making a persuasive argument for including popular media in our analyses of new technologies.” - Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor, Tufts University, USA
"In this essential work of media scholarship, Gerald Sim identifies the critical role that older technologies play in ushering the new. Through exquisite close readings, summoning extensive research into each film’s cultural and technical production, a handful of companies and individuals are shown to command an outsized influence on our visions of the future. Sim successfully litigates the case for algorithmic literacy to overcome our current indenture to machinic ways of seeing and valuing. Screening Big Data is an exemplary demonstration of how relevant film and screen studies can be for our shared emancipation" - Melissa Gregg, Sustainability Consultant, Reality Labs
