Big Data practice is in fact considerably more complex than Chris Anderson's cartoon picture. N may well not be all, or anything like all, for many producers of social knowledge, not least because this data is competitively harvested. No one corporation has access to the all, and few, if any, are willing to give up their share of that all to build a collective data pool, although corporate data sets are sometimes shared on a limited basis. In the infinitely large domain of data extraction, each company has a very particular vantage point tied to the functionality and market position of its data-gathering platform.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 397