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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Risks that may lurk in dealing with big data

Despite all of the promising indications of a rosy, data- This would lead to the third phenomenon, namely the
driven future, there are also critical voices that urge not possible apophenia, the false detection of patterns
to overvalue Big Data and to ensure correct handling of where actually there are none. Since the highly com-
it. plex graphics and analysis of Big Data could only be
read by a few experts, only this specific group would be
These voices include, for example, Professor Richard able to make statements, which could lead to over-
Rogers, professor of New Media and Digital Culture at interpretations.
the University of Amsterdam. He presented five points
of criticism regarding Big Data at the Data Days in Ber- The fourth point in Rogers lecture takes up the same
lin, basically concluding that we are at present in a issue again, criticizing the fact that the decision makers
phase of "disappointment" after the initial hype, but with have been reduced to small specialist teams, saying
Big Data getting a clear upward trend again. that we are "relying on one small team of data scien-
tists with special data access privileges". Common ana-
First point of criticism is the potentially hasty lysts and experts would rarely be consulted.
"reputational shift to large-scale infrastructures and their
analysts", a change of image and budgets towards large As a final point of criticism, Rogers argues that Big Da-
infrastructures and the few people that are able to han- ta may mislead a false sense of comfort. There is a
dle it. "shift to relying on available signals rather than seeking
out unavailable ones", he said, meaning that you
The second change Rogers observed, he called should rather rely more on elaborate analysis of exist-
“paradigm shift away from the interpretation ing data, then to try to search out new data that might
(hermeneutics) of text and data towards pure pattern not even be available yet, but could potentially be more
recognition, from close reading to distant reading", relevant. As a consequence people would just search
meaning from the detailed consideration of the individu- and not tackle the actual problems lying ahead.◊
al aspects towards a holistic view.
By MediaBUZZ

8 Asian eMarketing January 2015 - Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions