The big data divide and its consequences

Recent advances in technology and the increasing volumes of data that they enable have led to a wave of scholarly and popular attention to big data. While big data is often heralded for its ability to provide insight, the data, its analysis, and its outcomes are not evenly distributed. Currently, scholarship on big data is extending past work on the digital divide, theorizing a new big data divide. While this work most directly addresses the issues of ownership and access to big data, some work extends the divide to issues relating to skill and use. This extension opens up new complications relating to identity, social sorting, use, agency, and global development that are inextricably related to the issues above and to the study of big data. These issues go beyond the simple language of the digital divide extending inquiries into the realm of digital inequalities more generally. Any work on big data and the big data divide needs to engage with a more broad-based notion of digital inequalities to be better equipped to handle the complex issues above, as well as the material, democratic, and identity problems that big data bring about.