When data became big: revisiting the rise of an obsolete keyword

ABSTRACT

This article unpacks the short-lived but momentous buzz around big data. Although talk about big data was once widespread, little is known about the efforts animating its semantics. Tracing this sociotechnical imaginary, we revisit how business insiders and IT commentators fueled the ephemeral yet potent excitement around the term. Our genealogical examination rests on a selection of publications from 2013 to 2017. We employ methods from critical discourse analysis to interrogate how big data was written into being and hyped into a topic of concern. In this aspirational discourse, tech evangelists and writers extrapolated from contexts in which large troves of data were already being harnessed to suggest that inescapable transformations were imminent. They sought to concretize abstract and unfathomable quantities while simultaneously overwhelming their readers with a sense of vastness that exceeds all contexts and outruns the most exuberant expectations. The term may have lost this luster, but big data technologies and practices are an integral part of today’s technological infrastructures.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• sociotechnical imaginaries
• keyword
• genealogy
• critical discourse analysis
• critical data studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation under [grant number 447465824/PE 2436/3-1].

Notes on contributors

Christian Pentzold

Christian Pentzold is Chair and Professor of Media and Communications in the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Leipzig University. He is interested in the construction and appropriation of digital media and the roles information and communication technologies play in modern society. In current projects, he looks at the public understanding of big data, humans interacting with robots, the smart home, the organization and governance of peer production, as well as the interplay of time, data, and media.

Charlotte Knorr

Charlotte Knorr is a research associate in the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Leipzig University. Since April 2021, she has been working in the Framing Big Data research project. There, she studies the discursive framing of datafied processes both in professional communicative forms and user-generated content. Additionally, Charlotte is a trained mediator with a focus on Transformative Mediation for group disputes and conflicts.