Six Provocations for Big Data

With big data come big responsibilities, specifically in the realm of social media. There is a hint an emergence of a philosophy that big data is all one needs and that other scientific methods and disciplines are becoming outdated and unimportant. But big data can be incomplete because of how fragile data sources such as the Internet can be. Different social behaviors can be mapped but not necessarily compared because of the social channels being used. For example, a relative to whom one is close might not be online or involved with social media. Therefore, an incorrect assumption could be made that an individual is actually not close to that relative because of the visible data collected.