Social and Intellectual Antinomies of Information Technology

Information technology is progressing day by day, at a speed which exceeds our expectations. Therefore, the view about information technology is being torn into two conflicting poles. There are some antinomies of various dimensions in today's highly informative society.

At a socio-economic dimension, Big Data (and data-mining technology) is expected to rediscover the information marketplace as a rich untouched field, and that it will produce industrial reorganization and activation, just like fossil fuel (and mining technology) accelerated the Industrial Revolution in the 20th century. On the other hand, Big Data has been criticized for collecting all the action histories of people and reusing these as industrial resources, giving rise to the social movement opposed to excessive surveillance and marketing.

At an intellectual dimension, especially in the field of human science, the appearance of Big Data is expected to enable statistics technology and behavioral science to help explain people's decision making and mechanism of action selection, and help predict people's behavior objectively. On the other hand, there is a concern that the development of surveillance society or sales promotion may infringe on people's free will and humanness, and may seriously change the relation between an individual and society.

These social and intellectual antinomies are homologous to the thought situation of the 1960s in France, the confrontation between objectivism and subjectivism, where Bourdieu elaborated his sociology and the concept of Habitus. Today's antinomies of information technology could be considered by using Bourdieu's sociological methods of overcoming dualism.