Tag: Google
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The Big Data Value Chain
There are three types of company in the big-data value chain: the companies who collect the data, data-analytics companies, and data-ideas companies. This new ‘organisational landscape’ will change the power-relations between businesses enormously, at least according to Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier (2017) in ‘Big Data’: The Essential Guide to Life and Learning in the…
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What is Big Data?
Big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller scale. Big data analysis typically uses all available information and billions of data points to identify correlations which reveal new insights about human behaviour which are simply not available when using smaller data sets. Big data…
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The ‘Postmodern’ Tech Companies Embarking on ‘Modernist’ Projects
Technology Transnationals such as Apple, Google and Facebook have effectively embedded themselves into the lifeworlds of billions of people the world over through weaving their products and services into the fabric of daily life. While in many ways these tech firms are quintessentially postmodern, there are some ways in which they seem to harken back to…
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Technology Companies and the Digital Privatisation of Public Education
Education has long been influenced by private companies, but the rise of digital education has expanded the role of private technology companies, in public education enormously. Such companies range from the big global technology companies such as Microsoft and Facebook to smaller, silicon valley tech startups. This post explores the companies involved, and the neoliberal,…
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How Technology Companies Manipulate our Behaviour
Design features such as likes, swipes, notifications and autoplays make being on-line more addictive, less autonomous, and cause pyschological and social harm, at least according to this recent Guardian Article by Paul Lewis: Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia‘. Below I summarize this article and add in a…
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Is Google Sexist?
In a memo published in August 2017 a (male) Google engineer suggested that gender inequality in the technology industry in general and Google in particular is not due to sexism, but due largely to biological differences between men and women. The memo was called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” and the guy who wrote it was…
