Reality Regained: An Inquiry into the Data Age

Advances in computing power, methods of computing and machine learning all hugely expand the type of tasks that can be addressed and successfully resolved by machines. At the same time, the unprecedented uptake of lightweight technologies, the diffusion of digital platforms and social media, grant the current online environment a social dimension that was only vaguely present in the early internet. Taken together, these developments establish a cultural context that increasingly quantifies daily pursuits and induces the framing of ordinary life issues in terms of data and whatever relations can be inferred out of the crunching of large data volumes across lay and expert cultures. This is, on many counts, an epochal transformation through which the marks of a digital culture (data and data relations) crowd out the immediate reality of personal experience, experiential knowledge and situated interaction. Even though depersonalization and the diffusion of formal methods of living and knowing have been intrinsic to modernity, the current developments differ in some important respects that are worthy of being observed and analyzed.