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📄Research Article │ 🔍Refereed🔓Open Access

Accounting for the Social:
Investigating Commensuration and Big Data Practices at Facebook



📂Facebook’s Data Infrastructure This study explores Big Data practices at Facebook through an investigation of the role of commensuration or ‘the transformation of different qualities into a common metric’ in the structuration of analysis and interaction with a major online social media platform. It proposes a conceptual framework and demonstrates the empirical potential of a pragmatic approach based on reading published materials and available documentation. Facebook’s Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure serves as an illustrative example to begin tracing out and describe data assemblages in more detail. In being attentive to the motivations, drivers and challenges engineers face when dealing with Big Data, it is argued that their solutions can enable and support but also constrain specific analytical and transactional capabilities or data flows between various devices and actors. The analysis thus moves beyond methodological critiques of the utility of Big Data that lack empirical support and specificity. It is further argued that analytics not just describe but actively participate in the enactment of social worlds, thereby opening possibilities for new markets or market segments to arise. Online sociality accounts for a model of the social that makes it visible and measurable qua markets inviting data recontextualisation and the creation of value along multiple axes. Contra Facebook’s claim to make the web more ‘social’, an investigation of commensuration brings to the fore the question how the social is accounted for in the first place.




📋 ✍Cite

📋Cite (APA) van der Vlist, F. N. (2016). Accounting for the Social: Investigating Commensuration and Big Data Practices at Facebook. Big Data & Society, 3(1), 1–16. SAGE Publications. DOI: 10.1177/2053951716631365.
🔗Link (DOI)

Kind Journal Article; Original Research Article
Author F. N. van der Vlist
Publication Date 2016, February 9 [first published online]; 2016, January–June [issue published]
Journal Big Data & Society (BD&S)
Volume 3
Issue 1
Pages 1–16 (16)
Publisher SAGE Publications (London, United Kingdom)
Identifier 10.1177/2053951716631365 [self]; 2053-9517 [part of]
License CC BY-NC-ND 3.0


🖇Attached

🖇Attached Name 🕓Date Modified ↧ Kind Access
The Making of Predictions 2015-06-26 🎓 📄Thesis │ 📜 🌍Public
Calculation in Digital Architecture 2015-01-23 📝Working Paper