Rethinking Communication and Big Data: setting the path from the Journal of Communication special edition on big data

This paper explores the understanding of communication within the context of the emergence of big data, especially in what concerns the scientific production over Big Data, seeking to understand the methodological structures and dominant themes that underlie the discourses around big data, especially those associated with communication. To evaluate such claims, the research provides the first notes of a literature review on the articles of the special issue of the internationally recognized peer-reviewed Journal of Communication titled "Big Data in Communication Research", published in April 2014. Until now, it is the only issue in peerreviewed magazines exclusively dedicated to studies relating big data and communication research. After that, the paper will show the limits of claims of objectivity and neutrality in big data, and its dangers especially for communication studies, that still largely draws on models that implicitly assumes medium neutrality and take for granted that communication is information transmission (cf. Gunkel, 2012). For that, the paper will bring contributions of authors from the Media Theory tradition such as Parikka (2012), Kittler (1999), Mersch (2016), and others. The goal is to bring communication and big data studies into a reassessment.