David Beer, The Data Gaze (Sage 2018, Society and Space series) is reviewed at LSE Review of Books by Ignas Kalpokas.
It can by now be taken as a given that ‘data’ or, more precisely, ‘big data’ (often even capitalised to reflect its importance), has come to define today’s society. In fact, as David Beer suggests in this book, we are permanently put under ‘the data gaze’ that extracts, analyses and predicts key variables that are taken to define our world in increasingly granular detail, down to the level of the individual. In this timely and important book, Beer aims to shed light not only on how datafied visibility takes place, but also on how it is seen to act because this imaginary is key to the self-legitimation of the data analytics industry. [continues here]
