Is 'The Bigger the Better' Always True? Big Data and Knowledge Production in Marketing Research

摘要

The amount of data, the speed of data in and out, and the range of data types and sources allow us to differentiate Big Data from analytics and mere data. Imagine scatterplots overflowed with observations added every second to become a rough cloud that masks underlying relationships, or the possibility to predict the success of a book, a bankruptcy, or even a pregnancy. This is Big Data. One can understand pros and cons of big data by taking the example of photographs. Twenty years ago we were taking pictures with only one device and we had to take our film to be developed. Today we use mobile phones, tabs, webcams, cameras or even video cameras. Prices for storage and CPU technologies have been decreasing and let the opportunity for consumers to take thousands of photographs with different devices. Big data starts here; the amount of pictures and the numerous sources: 1. Imply to organize the data, but how? 2. Prevent us from seeing them all, therefore data are not entirely known.