Browsing by Author "Boucher, Jean-Christophe"

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    Democracy in the information age: the death of consciousness
    (2018) Tuttle, Devin; Boucher, Jean-Christophe
    The Information Age has produced a society where data has become the principal commodity; where citizens are valued by the information they can provide to institutions. When applied to the democratic process, how will political campaigns utilize this technology to advance their campaigns? What is the impact of Big Data and predictive analytics on individual autonomy and how does this contribute to an increasingly fragmented society? The 2008 United States Presidential election instituted a new norm of political practice. The early stages of predictive analytics, provided by user generated data, enabled the campaign to isolate subsets of potential voters and persuade them into active participants. As the norm of quantitative campaigning became increasingly entrenched, the 2016 Trump campaign would demonstrate the current apex of its application. Utilizing sophisticated Big Data analytics, with support from Cambridge-Analytica and the Giles-Parscale agency, the Trump campaign created individual behavioral profiles of over 215 million voters. Who they would then strategically target to mobilize or de-mobilize the population in fault line States. The advent of the Internet enabled the development of mass scale data operations; when applied to quantitative marketing techniques, it allows for legacy institutions to strategically manipulate individuals to their preferred outcome. The predictive analytical techniques, that have been embedded throughout democratic societies are directly contributing to an increasingly fragmented society. As legacy institutions obtain more data they will increase their capacity to manipulate populations; changing the nature of political consciousness and contributing to an increasingly fragmented polis.
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    Democracy in the information age: the new political enigma
    (2018) Tuttle, Devin; Boucher, Jean-Christophe
    The introduction of the Internet to the toolkit of political campaigns has cardinally altered the landscape of democratic elections. As the Internet has expanded so has the level of information it brings alongside, where the amount of data produced in 2017 outweighs the entirety of human societies. Prior to the Age of Information, society has been limited in their capacity to access information, now we are purview to information glut; with unprecedented information comes unprecedented consequences. Data has provided a means for institutions to accumulate, calculate, and nudge human interaction based on predictive analytical techniques where this compendium of information, produced through the Internet, has reduced citizens into analytical nodes. But what is the long run impact of a future predicated on predictive analytics, where individuals are compiled into grand data sets and outcomes are the result of scaled data operations? This paper seeks to rectify this question. When applied to the democratic process, how will political campaigns utilize this technology to advance their campaigns? What is the impact of Big Data and predictive analytics on individual autonomy and how does this contribute to an increasingly fragmented society?