Regarding societal and academic discourses on ‚big data‘, it can be exemplarily observed how technological trends are brought up by the (mass) media, reflected in academic publications, turned into business models and consulting literature as well as research funding programmes. At some point, however, some actors within (media) educational research took up on those ‚data traces‘ in a twofold way. On the one hand, digital data is understood as a handy means for algorithmic control of learning processes within efficient e-learning environments. On the other hand, a data-driven or ‚datized‘ society as well as the inscribed myths are interpreted as a threat to free or neutral internet use, ‚open learning‘ processes etc. (cf. Gapski, 2015; Selwyn, 2014). Since technology- (or media-)oriented educational research necessarily needs to deal with a certain delay of theoretical and empirical considerations, the guiding question for its „leading capacity“ (cf. CfP ECER 2016) in approaching societal phenomena like big data must be posed in a specific way.

In this paper, it is argued that the specificity of educational media studies lies, firstly, in its semi-permeable subdisciplinary boundaries that allow scholars to draw approaches, concepts and theories from a wide range of neighbor disciplines and synthesize those perspectives in integrative modeling of complex socio-technic constellations. As Keiner (cf. 2015) proved in his Key Note at the Aachen conference on blind spots in media education, this relation is not reciprocal. Secondly, educational research is priviledged and cursed at the same time by its normative and interventional foundations.

The first argument herein leads to a suggestion how to objectivate the phenomenon ‚Big Data‘ in an appropriate, multidisciplinary way. It is suggested to grasp the complex constellation in a model of a „media apparatus/dispositif“, inspired by Jean-Louis Baudry (cf. 1974) as well as Michel Foucault (cf. 1980) to get to understand the relations between discourses, practices, objects, subjects and their subjectivations. The second argument calls for an adequate response from media education. One possible and most important mode of response is claimed in a critical attitude (cf. Foucault, 2007), not only for ‚media literate‘ subjects, but also for media education itself.

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