Hubbub

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The great agglomeration.

Every exchange, conversation, chat, chat-up line, rant, rave, jibe & troll;
Every miscued punchline, dad joke, cracker joke, every happy hols & rick roll;
All rock & roll
Every greeting, question, query, inquiry & search;
Every spam, phish, & mass-mail flyer flogging the merch;
Every interrogation, excoriation, evisceration & demolition;
Every thread, sick burn, everything anyone just left here —
Let that sink in;
Every cry for help; offer to help, refusal to help,
Every self-serve, grand-stand, own-book talk & play to the crowd;
Every comment on the blog by whoever was wowed;
Every ping-back, come-back, wise-crack & hot-take;
Every precis, submission, footnote & annotation; Every careful articulation & each throw-away comment; Every like, smiley, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, chin-scratch & heart; Every helpful, not-helpful, retweet or share —

As long as it was captured on digital flypaper

Then deceased, then stripped, dried out, expired, and gutted.

Gutted of its context, its personal genealogy — its life: these metaphors are dead, expired, shuffled off the mortal coil and with the choir eternal — embalmed, denuded of circumstance, emotional state, timbre and nuance; sanded down and its serial numbers and identifiers removed; genericised, blended and bunched into a warm, brown entropic emulsion that clogs and congeals.

This is the petrol that feeds the engines of big data.

See also

• Big data
• Data modernism
• Great delamination