Anderson/Kitchen Response

Data 150

Technology is revolutionary. It often provides us with a new method to understand and control the world. With the development of the internet, communication was revolutionized. Information became easy to access and today, so much is at our fingertips. In his article Anderson describes his idea of the “death of theory”, which is his prediction about how big data will prove to be revolutionary. He believes that it is essentially going to cause the end of theory and completely change the scientific process as we know it. Anderson believes that through big data we no longer need to theorize and analyze the data and results we are getting scientifically as we have in the past. He uses an example from Google to help explain his idea. Essentially, google doesn’t need to know exactly why a certain web link is more likely to be clicked on than another. Instead, he argues that the fact that one link is more attractive and clickable is all that matters. He believes that big data means we don’t need to take samples in order to answer questions we wonder about. Instead, we take the petabytes of data and let it speak to us. We collect as much information through analysis of these giant datasets but without necessarily approaching it with a particular idea in mind. He believes this removes factors of human bias and gives us more potential to understand the world around us. He believes this is the inevitability of the future. Kitchin, in his article, however certainly disagrees. While he sees big data as a powerful source of knowledge that will continue to be tapped into, he doesn’t believe that the data has a voice of its own. Kitchin instead believes in a sort of compromise between Anderson’s idea and the current system primarily employed today. He is in favor of utilizing big data in our favor but combining it with theory and understanding the why instead of merely the what. Personally, I feel knowing a correlation is not neccessarily enough. I agree more with Kitchin becasue I feel that it is human nature to wonder about what causes something to happen. It is not enough to know that one link is more clickable. It is human nature to wonder why and having that knowledge can be important as it can guide us in making future links more clickable. Science, by nature, is a process that requires ideas that originate in our brain, but we definitely should take advantage of the power of big data. We should let the data speak to us, but we should also speak to the data.