By Nick Clayton
Twitter could almost have been created as a tool for scientific analysis. It churns out vast quantities of data in a format that looks perfect for computational crunching. But do tweets reflect what is really going on in the world? The BBC reports on how “engineers” (of which more later) from Texas Rice University monitored tweets during American football games. Professor Lin Zhong said that this tracking revealed what was happening in the game sometimes faster than broadcast media, often registering big events within 20 seconds.
This Twitter-following technique, he said, could be applied to anything from monitoring reactions during televised political debates to revealing the location and duration of power cuts.
“People don’t often think of themselves as being sensors, but each of us constantly senses and reacts to our environment.
“Thanks to social media sites like Twitter, it is now possible to capture those reactions—for millions of people—in real time,” he said.
However, other scientists were warning of the potential dangers of focusing too much research on social media and big data analysis techniques. Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research and Kate Crawford of the University of New South Wales raised a series of questions in a paper for Oxford Internet Institute’s “A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society.” One of the questions they raise is about the degree to which individuals have given permission for their social media activities to be used:
Researchers are rarely in a user’s imagined audience, neither are users necessarily aware of all the multiple uses, profits and other gains that come from information they have posted. Data may be public (or semi-public) but this does not simplistically equate with full permission being given for all uses. There is a considerable difference between being in public and being public, which is rarely acknowledged by Big Data researchers.
The paper also raises the question of which academic skill-set becomes most valuable in the era of big data (and why the BBC’s reference to “engineers” may be relevant).
When computational skills are positioned as the most valuable, questions emerge over who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged in such a context. This, in its own way, sets up new hierarchies around ‘who can read the numbers’, rather than recognizing that computer scientists and social scientists both have valuable perspectives to offer. Significantly, this is also a gendered division. Most researchers who have computational skills at the present moment are male.
There is also, the paper suggests, an implicit threat to academic freedom in the use of big data.
Large data companies have no responsibility to make their data available, and they have total control over who gets to see it.Big Data researchers with access to proprietary data sets are less likely to choose questions that are contentious to a social media company, for example, if they think it may result in their access being cut.
Finally, Yahoo Research (who knew that existed?) has been examining the production, flow and consumption of tweets. The main conclusion of the study is that, actually, it is a very small group of Twitter accounts that is responsible for most of the noise.
We find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter, in that roughly 50% of URLs consumed are generated by just 20K elite users, where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followe
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