Cultural Motifs of Big Data in User-Generated Content

This project examines the sensemaking around Big Data in user-generated content on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter/X. Big Data is not only a technology but an issue of public concern. Yet given that the buzzword “Big Data” has been around for more than a decade, there is a dearth of knowledge about how the cultural motifs used to make sense of the notion have changed over time. Little is known too about how Big Data has featured in user-generated content that could equally reverberate or dispute the views established by elite forums of news and high-profile publications. To fill this gap, we use a semi-automated content analysis for examining the ensuing discourse around “Big Data” over a period of ten years. We focus on cultural motifs that anchor Big Data frames in sensemaking. Combing manual annotation with classification models and BERT* techniques, we found three dominating cultural motifs out of seven that either pivot on profits and prediction, a shift in datafying society, or innovations for societal progress. The motifs encapsulate a range of topics that point us to a diversity of adjoining discourses on datafication writ-large.