As Theodore Porter put it, “Quantification is a technology of distance.” Some distance is inherent to the abstraction involved in producing all quantified knowledge of the social. Such distance is more than a distance from one’s subjective opinion—practices of quantification also involve a social separation, the development of “forms of expertise and power relations” that allocate the power to quantify to some actors and not others. It is easy to forget “the social conditions in which science is possible,” as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once noted, but that is exactly what we must not do in the era of the God view.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 385