Week 3 Retrospect
In the past week, I have taken two intensive classes. These four days have been very intense for me. Both teachers and students have worked very hard. But in this process, I have learned many fields that I have never touched before. Let me have a more in-depth thinking on my future research direction.
After several weeks of discussion on data analysis, text extraction, social inequality and other topics, I will be more interested in the application and development of data analysis in social media. Data analysis plays a crucial role in social media. I want to know how it uses data to analyse and predict user preferences and development trends. I think the text mining course I just finished will be very helpful to my research direction. I want to pay attention to the risk of information disclosure in the process of data analysis. This is also a key to data analysis. I hope to conduct my research from these two aspects. I think I need more discussion and literature reading to clarify my plan.This is what I think till now.
Hi Genevieve, thanks for your initial project idea. It’s a really interesting, important, and contemporary one! I assume you’re referring to data analysis done within private corporations for the purposes of targeted advertising and developing user profiles and such for commercial benefit?
A few questions to think about: What are the kinds of inequalities that result from the ways corporations analyse and act on social media data? Is there a particular ‘faultline’ of inequality you have in mind already? If not, then reading around the subject might give you some ideas. Also, what are the kinds of methods you think would be needed to develop this project? Do you think you would also like to use data analysis of social media as research method? Or more of a qualitative approach? No need to have all the answers now – just still collecting questions to think about at this stage! We can talk further in our group supervision meeting.
Hi Gen,
Great topic- I’ve been reading a lot about surveillance capitalism and the use of behavioural surplus by big data firms to make money, in preparation for an upcoming intensive I have for Datafication, Accountability and Democracy. The course readings list may be worth having a look at to give you an idea of the type of research that has already been done in this area as a starting point. I found it really interesting to discover that Google was the pioneer for surveillance capitalism but its decisions to use behavioural surplus as a method of capital accumulation came from a necessity to innovate for survival, particularly as it was operating as a new start-up at the time the dot com bubble had just burst. It made me think about first movers and whether governance needs to make better considerations of their characteristics (including their vulnerability and how this impacts their decisions, and the possible impact their decisions can make on an entire industry). The point I’m trying to make here is that inequalities can perhaps be looked at from the firm side as well as from a user perspective