29 Social Media, Big Data, and Critical Marketing
29 SOCIAL MEDIA, BIG DATA, AND CRITICAL MARKETING Christian Fuchs Introduction Social media and big data have become ubiquitous keywords in everyday life. The term social media is commonly used for social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Weibo), blogs (e.g. WordPress, Tumblr), micro-blogs (e.g. Twitter), user-generated content-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr, Instagram), or wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) (Fuchs, 2017b, chapter 2). Big data refers to the collection and analysis of data in such vast quantities that humans are incapable of process- ing them – only algorithms can (Fuchs, 2017b, chapter 2). There are diverse sources of big data, one example being credit and debit card transactions. So, the term big data is not limited to social media. At the same time, given that Facebook has about 1.8 million monthly active users1 and Google processes more than 100 billion searches per year on average,2 these two U.S. Internet companies are probably the largest data processors in the world. This tells of an inherent link between big data and social media. While social media characterize the techno-social systems enabling human interaction on the Internet, big data are the digital results of human activities. Google, Facebook and other online platforms tend to store all data and meta-data for long peri- ods of time and therefore require huge server farms consisting of numerous supercomputers. Google and Facebook are two of the world’s largest companies. In the 2016 Forbes ranking of the world’s 2,000 largest transnational corporations, Google (the holding company Alphabet Inc.
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