A DATA SOCIETY: INFORMATION, CONTROL, AUTOMATION AND THE LAW

Resumo

The rapid evolution of communication and information technology in recent decades changed social relations. Human communication is remedied - begins to occur by other means. In this paradigm was born the so-called era of information or the information society, where information acquires essential good status, perhaps the more profitable and important of all - who controls information controls the world. Nowadays useful information can be extracted from data – content massively generated in networks every day, such as the internet. This raises a question: how to understand control relations having in sight the contemporary ocean of data? A deleuzian model can offer potential to understand the control relations in contemporary society. The evolution of information, control and automation technologies in recent decades and the emergence of the information era are trademarks of what can be referred as society of control, which has for objective the constant modulation of individuals for its purposes – a permanent production of subjectivity. The control mechanisms are continuously exercised over subjects, for the purpose of modulating their behavior and actions. As control is based in information, and information is extracted from data – the society of control can be referred as a society of data, a broader concept that can cover other mechanisms and technologies. Big data and analytics technologies can be examples of this functioning. These technologies were created to search for correlations in the ocean of data, in order to extract useful information, generating impacts in almost every social field, including the Law. In this context, another question appears: how big data technologies may transform legal practice in the contemporary data society? On one hand, there are possibilities for the use of big data technologies in order to assist in the legal decision-making process, as well as the reverse is possible. It is necessary to deeply understand the structure and functions of big data technologies, in order to enable its use to help human decision-making. On the other hand, these technologies may create new forms of discrimination, and also increasingly threaten privacy and even the personal identity construction process. There are paradoxes in these technologies that may be less problematic with the construction of a big data ethics.