The Impact on the Future of Media Education of Big Data Usage in the Contemporary Media Industries

Work carried out in the media industries is increasingly influenced by Big Data usage, analytics and derivations. The enormous amount of information generated about and by netizens, social media users, online service providers, subscribers, shoppers, and retailers constitutes Big Data. This gets categorized, dissected, analyzed, and processed, as a result of which substantive extrapolations and inferences are derived and subsequently shape funding, production and output in the media industries — such as television, journalism, advertising and public relations. Continuously expanding Big Data as well as the computing methods associated with its collection and processing bear explicit resonance to how output from the media industries reflects social and professional transformations caused by current technological advances. And this resonance needs to be better taken into account when media courses and programs are taught in contemporary higher education contexts. Educators have to ensure that contemporary media students can comprehensively understand how and why large-scale data-sets are collected, scrutinized and interpreted for meaning and value to be ultimately created out of digital information. It is not enough to just talk about the implications of Big Data usage, analytics and derivations: those now have to be fully integrated into media education, essentially to nurture in future media professionals the ability to understand, analyze, and apply Big Data when making investment decisions and generating output within various sections of the media industries. Various aspects of Big Data need to be more present in the teaching curriculum of contemporary media courses and programs considering how it is already seriously impacting on ways of doing and of knowing, as well as on ethical considerations and on the negotiation of value within the media industries.