Take an example far from social media: the discipline of logistics. The goal of logistics is to use continuously connected data flows to organize all aspects of production across space and time within global commodity chains. It was enabled, decades before social media, by software inventions such as the relational databases that help businesses find patterns in huge data flows across diverse sources and locations.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 49