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Hello. Now to to speak, very frankly, I never got on too well with structural functionalists or

indeed with ethnomethadologists. But that hardly made me special. You see, most departments of sociology contain academics

with similar aversions. I mean symbolic interactionists, with little time for structuralists,

Viberians who avoid the company of Marxists, and feminists are exercised by any talk of the

disciplines founding fathers. There is though one division which tends to cut across these

other dimensions, the distinction between quantitative and qualitative

approaches to understanding the social world.

But just last year, I chaired a Hayon Y session on something called Big Data and heard a speaker argue that the new forms of

information gathering meant that the old division between quantity and quality was breaking

down. For now we didn't merely have hard demographic figures on people's age and occupation and salary and

social class.

We also had much softer data.

Data on how they felt their precise tastes in music and food and art and politics and literature and pornography.

Well to help me discuss this dramatic development and its implications for

social science and elsewhere I'm now joined in the studio by Frank Pasquale who is professor of law at the University of Maryland,

an author of the Black Box Society, the secret algorithms that control money and information.

Frank, this, uh, the title of your book, Black Box. This presumably

the analogy is coming from the aircraft black box that we know about. Yes that's

one half of the analogy. I was really intrigued by the

development of event data recorders that were taking crack of every single bit of

...