Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Boris Manenti the French journalist with Le Nouvel Observateur has published an article in the monthly magazine ‘Obsession’ on how big data collections could lead to big brother. In the article he states “Big Data is the massive volume of digital data that is so large to process that it needs additional management tools and database processing applications. It is much more than a concept; it’s a whole new technology that promises to “revolutionize our everyday lives.” The term “Big Data” originated from a simple observation. Every day around the world, 2.5 exabytes of data are generated. This data comes from everywhere: social networks, photos and videos posted on the Internet, GPS coordinates from smart phones, weather statistics from every corner of the earth, banking transactions, and so on. This massive amount of information only reveals its full potential after being processed, analyzed and cross-referenced.  …The implications of Big Data are numerous – in theory at least. For the moment, the analysis of massive amounts of data mostly concerns companies who use it as a way to analyze their clients’ consumer habits. …The problem is the public’s acceptance. Big Data cannot be allowed to turn into “Big Brother.” “The users’ trust is crucial,” says Chuck Hollis. “To get the best medical treatment, we give our doctor as much information as we can, because we trust him. Big Data needs to convince its users it can be trusted in the same way.” He adds: “Every new technology creates new fears. Fire, electricity, the Internet, Big Data. With good there is always bad, we just need to keep that in check.”

Inspired by Boris Manenti, Nouvel Observateur ow.ly/gXF3Z Image source Twitter ow.ly/gXF2K

Benoit Georges the French journalist and head of Innovations and Skills department with Les Echos has published an article on Worldcrunch titled ‘Do Smart Phones Make Us Dumber? Asking The Internet’s Intelligence Questions’. Georges states “Italian linguist Raffaele Simone and French philosopher Jean-Michel Besnier deliver very different views on the matter. According to Simone, modern men and women are “caught in the Web,” absorbed in the “media sphere”, which he describes as an “environment in which online electronic media play a fundamental role,” and create, “from nothing, trends, needs and new pressures.” …Written knowledge allows thoughts to be structured and more complex than oral communications. It is based on a specific form of intelligence Simone called “sequential” – meaning the way we assimilate new information, one after the other. The Web and videos, on the other hand, favor a “simultaneous” form of intelligence – we are capable of taking in different types of information at the same time but without “being able to put them in order as a logical succession, with hierarchy.” …Jean-Michel Besnier’s … asks a simple question: “How does the cultured species that we are, born from the Age of Enlightenment and having witnessed totalitarianism, let itself become a slave to its machines?” The situations in which we delegate our responsibility to objects or programs are multiplying: Search engines algorithms decide which websites best match our needs; the so called “service” robots that are supposed to take better care than us of the elderly or autistic children; the GPS navigators without which we are completely lost… Besnier believes this dehumanization existed long before computers. According to him, the industrial revolution – that transformed men into operators of machines that were more powerful than them – was already part of this movement.”

Inspired by Benoit Georges, Worldcrunch ow.ly/gH0mm Image source Twitter ow.ly/gH0kW

Stephen Elop the 47 year old Swedish president and chief executive officer of Nokia Corporation in a speech posted on an internal blog identified significant concerns at the world’s largest manufacturer of smart-phones, which is quickly being overrun for market share by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Elop using a North Sea analogy warned the company was “standing on a burning platform” and needed to act swiftly to implement radical change to survive, claiming competitors weren’t just taking market share with devices but with an entire powerful enclosed ecosystem which including developers. Elop suggested the battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, resulting in Nokia having to decide how to either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

Inspired by Charles Arthur ow.ly/3WD5m image source lucasartoni ow.ly/3WD16