To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (Vincent Mosco)

P19
When economist Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller bagan to turn their attention to communication in the 1950s and '60s, they drew connections between their new filed of study and the resources, like agriculture and oil, that had occupied economists for many years (Mosco 2009, 82-89).
(The Political Economy of Communication)

Around this time the computer scientist turned public-policy analyst Anthony Oettinger developed a general resource theory that linked energy and materials to information, and it became the conceptual foundation for the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy, which Oettinger chaired for several decades. When the communication scholar Marc Uri Porat (1977) published his influential map of the shift to an economy powered by information workers, it became time to think about an information economy.
(Porat, Marc Uri. 1977. The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement. Office of Telecommunications Special Publication 77-12, May. Washington. DC: US Department of Commerce)

Videotex--- P. 21   This was a computer-based service that delivered information from a central facility to users at terminals in their homes, in public places, and to a lesser degree, in business. Users were able to interact with the service by making specific information requests.
…
Videotex held great promise as report after report predicted major transformations in every aspect of life,…
(Tydeman, John, Hubert Lipinskim, Richard P. Adler….. 1982   Teletext and videotex in the United States     New York: McGrawHill.)

Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
for economic planning and control
Gerovitch, Slava. 2010. "The cybernetic scare and the origins of the internet"    Baltic worlds  (online resources)
Spufford, Francis. 2010. Red Plenty.  London: Faber and Faber

The Computer Utility comes to Chile (25-29)

p. 180-182
four elements of big data
1) the data under analysis are invariably quantitative in that operations are applied to numerical values of objects, events, outcomes, ideas, opinions, etc.
2) big data develops generalization based on correlations among variables.    a growing respect for correlations rather than a continuing quest for elusive causality.
3) tends to be theoretical
4) primary goal of big data is to be predictive