Tamar Sharon and Dorien Zandbergen present an interesting enough discussion regarding the general pro's and con's of data and it's power. Starting by addressing the fact that there is in fact contention regarding Big Data and the society formed as a result, the following article focuses on a central component of data society with the notion of "tracking."
Tracking, in this sense, is essentially the point of data in contemporary society. As Sharon and Zandbergen state, data in our world has "its value framed in terms of political power, insofar as it enhances various forms of government surveillance, and in terms of monetary resource, as it benefits corporate profit." (p.1696). Tracking is this application of data collected to visualise the movements and potential use of groups of people.
Getting into the different ways that people are tracked, we are introduced to case studies wherein people found creating their own means of tracking themselves, generating individual data theoretically separate from that Big Data that is logged, was a "liberating" experience. This may seem like a resistance against data-driven society is being formed, but it isn't. This is more like a reverse-psychological phenomenon; not wanting to be part of the big data pool by creating your own data is still generation of data and, method dependant, this information can still be used and manipulated.
These self-tracking people believe that they are outside the influence of Big Data via their practices. However, I would argue a paradox in that the meaning associated with data is its ability to track the 'movements' of people. Self-tracking achieves the same goal of Big Data, just in a different way. An argument can be made for the inaccessibility of that individual data because it is generated away from the same grid, but as surveillance increases this data is likely to end up in the same pool.
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