The Big Data as ‘presentification’ of knowledge

The rise of Big Data prompts the Sociology of Knowledge to wonder about a predictive model in which the forecasting responsibility slides from the human being to the artificial intelligence, the method abandons theories to correlations, the purpose ceases to be the acceleration in the discovery path and turns into planning of algorithms.The hypothesis advanced in the paper is that Big Data can be analyzed as a form of ‘presentification’ of knowledge in consonance with the change in the temporal sensitivity that affects western societies over the past thirty years. It seems that the insatiable demand for data doesn't only satisfy the need of forecasting but also the one of legitimation of cultural constructions, unanswered claim in the ‘absolute present’. Social acceleration inhibits the vision of the future that, during Modernity, allowed people to transcend the present in order to improve it on the incentive of project imagination.In lack of time for planning, Big Data succeed in allowing decisions in urgency. The structural uncertainty is faced by an exhaustive reading of the past that actually becomes an automatic guide. By legitimizing the present through the past yet, Big Data predictive models risk to promote the conservation of the status quo