Dati mancanti, dati mancati. Cancel culture, data bias e data gap nell’era dei big data

In a media landscape increasingly impregnated with cancel culture, it is extremely urgent to deal with the way in which sign destructure and erasure is itself the establishment of a regime of signification. The specific examples of erasure that we would like to discuss in this article, however, propose to broaden the reflection from the practices and strategies of erasure, replacement, obliteration and substitution of already given cultural units to the practices that make possible the emergence of these cultural units as given, in fact preventing the emergence of other cultural units, as shown by recent studies on data gaps and data bias. More specifically, what we would like to point out in these pages is the complicated relationship between data (statistical data but also big data) and cancel culture. As we shall see, the discourses that, implicitly or explicitly, open a reflection on how data are not given at all but, on the contrary, are in fact objects of continuous negotiation, on the one hand inaugurate a new way of looking at data, very different from the classic functionalist and positivist approach, and on the other hand offer new insights into the dynamics of cancellation itself, when they are no longer exercised over types and tokens, but over the conditions of possibility of such types and tokens.