Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 206

more than the all-too-common attempts to fetishize big data. But big
data is more than just a methodological tool. It promotes a very speciic
way of knowing that, when connected to the global expansion of cloud
computing, has signiicant implications. Speciically, cloud computing
provides a powerful technological grounding to support big data's digital
positivism or the speciic belief that the data, suitably circumscribed by
quantity, correlation, and algorithm, will, in fact, speak to us. The ability
to process billions of data points in the cloud, in the time that it takes
to read this sentence, helped to legitimize Google's lu-virus project, as
it does so many other big-data projects. The cloud may be central to a
myth but, in this as in so many other cases, myths matter. It is therefore
important to critique the cloud as a cultural force because it is not just
a method; it is a complete way of knowing that, if left without serious
critical relection, will crowd out other legitimate paths to understanding.
The cloud is an enormously powerful metaphor, arguably the most
important developed in the short history of the IT world. As such, its
signiicance far outweighs the accurate but banal roots of the term in the
cloud network diagrams produced by telecommunications specialists.
Naming it the cloud taps into a rich literary and discursive history that
terms like cyberspace, Internet, and even the web fail to match. By its
nature, culture resists essentialisms of all types, including the tendency in
the digital world, now embodied in cloud computing, to reduce the cloud
to an information repository and the foundation for the digital positiv-
ism of big-data analysis. There is more to the metaphor of the cloud than
its crudely rendered image in the network diagrams that gave rise to the
term cloud computing . Contrast this image, which looks as if drawn by a
child, with the eerie, cloud-illed painting The Empire of Light by the icon
of surrealism René Magritte. The painting features the bright blue of a
daytime sky illed with puffy white clouds that oversee a row of houses
in nighttime darkness. Unlike the cloud-computing diagram, which uses
the image of the cloud to naturalize the technology, Magritte's jarring
clash of row houses in darkness under the bright clouds and blue sky of
daytime suggests that something is seriously awry in the clouds and on
the ground.
Clouds are among the most evocative images in the history of culture
because they have been a daily part of the lives of everyone who has ever
lived. It is no surprise, therefore, that cloud gazing to search for symbols