Infoglut How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know [Hardcover]

Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of cutting through the clutter of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, sentiment analysts, and decision markets offer to help bodies of data speak for themselves making sense of their own patterns so we dont have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind peoples words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehensionat least for those with access to the data.

Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and big data, and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.

1. Introduction: Infoglut and Clutter-Cutting  2. Intelligence Glut: Policing, Security, and Predictive Analytics  3. Emotional Glut: Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis  4. Future Glut: Marketocracy  5. Glut Instinct: Body Language and Visceral Literacy  6. Neuro-Glut: Marketing to the Brain  7. Theory Glut: From Critique to Conspiracy  8. Cutting Through the Glut: Knowledge Small Enough to Know

Mark Andrejevic's compelling new book is an impressive survey of the impact of big data on domains extending from bodies and brains to policing, marketing, and sentiment analysis. As it documents the shift from comprehension to correlation, Infoglutraises disturbing questions regarding new operations of power and control in a worlƒs