Deleuze and Big Data: How Facebook's Use of Big Data Analytics Shifts Legal Personhood, Privacy and Commercial Expression

This thesis explores the application of Deleuze to the use of big data analytics by Facebook to conceptualize the fusion between the physical and digital world. The fusion of technology and everyday life revolves around a debate between technological determinism and instrumentalism. This thesis begins by examining the operation of Facebook as a web 2.0 service and applies a Deleuzian discourse to explore Facebook as an assemblage of control. This assemblage is framed as a soft form of technological determinism in the control of a mass aggregated population of profiles. Facebook’s profiles are representative of Deleuze’s dividual, a replicated image of the self held in data. The combination of the use of data based surveillance and the data feedback loop in retrieving, analyzing and manipulating these profiles leads to a series of legal challenges. This thesis seeks to provide a framework for understanding these challenges in law.