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| Culture and Data: The convenience of a mobile phone (Source: Wikipedia Commons)
Humans make errors... Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions...We make decisions with partial information...We are forced to steer by guesswork... That is, some of us do. Others use data.
(Wolf, 2010)
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The way that we, as social beings, interact with not only each other but also our personal technologies has an immeasurable influence over our everyday experiences.
This week, in analysing the role of 'Culture and Data', I first came to reflect upon the above extract from Wolf's 2010 article in the New York Times.
Of course, the case study in that example is - for want of a better term - a bit 'full on', or a little 'extreme'. Perhaps so ... but conversely... not at all.
Data serves to give meaning and to provide reasoning (Edwards, 2010). Data, in its purest form, is a concrete set of figures depicting (and/or determining) human activity, allowing 'objective analysis'.
From that example, I began to critique my own actions, in which data may directly (or indirectly, unknowingly) affect my consequential behaviours.
Websites (some) often collate data to determine how long you've spent on their servers. This is generally a figure which needs to be manually 'toggled' by the user, but nevertheless, its role and purpose remain clear once more.
Just as was the case in the aforementioned coffee scenario, this too could be used to 'wean' users from the site - aka, stop wasting time and do something productive! I would argue that if very popular sites i.e Facebook, Twitter, (and perhaps, even the Arts2090 moodle page...) had this feature embedded, we'd be quite shocked at the time spent on the site (or the lack thereof?)
This week, in analysing the role of 'Culture and Data', I first came to reflect upon the above extract from Wolf's 2010 article in the New York Times.
Of course, the case study in that example is - for want of a better term - a bit 'full on', or a little 'extreme'. Perhaps so ... but conversely... not at all.
Data serves to give meaning and to provide reasoning (Edwards, 2010). Data, in its purest form, is a concrete set of figures depicting (and/or determining) human activity, allowing 'objective analysis'.
From that example, I began to critique my own actions, in which data may directly (or indirectly, unknowingly) affect my consequential behaviours.
Websites (some) often collate data to determine how long you've spent on their servers. This is generally a figure which needs to be manually 'toggled' by the user, but nevertheless, its role and purpose remain clear once more.
Just as was the case in the aforementioned coffee scenario, this too could be used to 'wean' users from the site - aka, stop wasting time and do something productive! I would argue that if very popular sites i.e Facebook, Twitter, (and perhaps, even the Arts2090 moodle page...) had this feature embedded, we'd be quite shocked at the time spent on the site (or the lack thereof?)
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| Websites may (and often can, with user permissions) monitor time spent on the servers. |
This too made me think: does data solely reflect the doings of the person, or is it the individual who stands to mirror the collected figures?
In the above example of website session monitoring, it is innately the user who determines the length of time that they should spend on the site - and therefore, the data that stands to be collected.
When data is represented in, a news bulletin, per se, I would then argue that data may affect our cultural stance.
Generally speaking (again, with the previous examples in mind) data collation could only be viewed as a positive thing.
There are downfalls to some data collection, however, not least breaches affecting consumer finances and online security.
"As data breaches exposing consumer credit card, debit card and other personal information become more common, nearly half of cardholding shoppers say they're reluctant this holiday season to return to stores that have been hacked, according to a new survey by CreditCards.com."
(Marketwired - Oct 22, 2014)
Although I've thus far spoken of 'Culture' and 'Data' being two single entities, Manovich (2009) argued that culture is data; whereby increasingly, "measures are taken in which the digital preservation of cultural assets is turning into an obligatory act"
This notion of 'obligatory' data collection (or monitoring) is readily apparent when people actively monitor kilojoule or calorie intake as a part of a well-managed, or 'strict', pattern of eating.
Furthermore, Manovich notes the importance (or relevance) of visualisation in the data collection process. From what we've come to know in our Arts2090 tutes is that while visualisations come to easily represent data, they too can open up new lines of thought. Manovich also takes up this positioning.
"We can create interactive visualizations and dynamic maps of large cultural data sets to find new patterns – and to generate new theoretical questions."
Therefore from this brief discussion, we may observe both how and why data and culture are not mutually exclusive entities, and that they coexist not only to determine human behaviour, but to also provide the reasoning behind it.
References:
Edwards, Paul N. (2010) ‘Introduction’ in A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: xiii-xvii
Manovich, L. (2009) 'Culture is Data', accessed via: http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/culture-is-data/
Wolf, G. (2010) 'The Data-Driven Life', accessed via: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?_r=0
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