Data is everywhere, inclusive of the smallest movements or
habits we have to the encompassing the world and even the universe. The only
problem is collecting such vast amounts of data and presenting them in simpler
understandable graphics; and with the rise of technology, most of which is
focused on this issue, we have seen an explosion of data sets and infographics
in our everyday life. This has become so prevalent in our everyday life, with
graphs and graphics becoming an essential tool in presenting information, it
has become commonplace and taken for granted, sometimes even overlooked.
These tools, however, are very useful in that they help us
understand the ridiculous amounts of data that are produced and recorded every
minute. It helps us both understand and thus produce our own perspective of
what can be seen as a recorded version of reality. The most obvious instance of
this is virtual reality programs such as the ones discussed in my previous blog
post (the IDEO Labs video and the virtual hand experiment) as well as in
slightly more obscure uses like data of human movements and habits which are
used in virtual gaming worlds as well as personalised advertising and a host of
other examples involved with creating patterns and inferences based on recorded
data.
The examples given in Gary Wolf’s article “The Data-Driven
Life” (while on the more extreme end of the spectrum) really exemplify the modern
use of recording and using data in everyday life to better understand our
habits. This is where media comes in, with personalised profiles being cross
referenced with internet history, companies like Google and Facebook have quite
easily been able to produce search results and advertising tailored to each and
every one of our wants and needs (although the computer often gets it wrong). While
this may seem an invasion of privacy, it has also produced incredibly good
results with companies like Dunhumby Ltd which use data to predict when and how
people will shop, reporting a massive rise in profits.
There are, however, still a number of instances where data
has perhaps been overused, resulting in irrelevant or arbitrary data being
presented. A more personal example (and one of my pet peeves) is in sport
commentating (mainly in American sport) where ridiculously overglorified stats
that have no meaning or bearing are used to create completely baseless
inferences. These examples are becoming happening a lot less now, it seems as a
result of developing technology and experience with data; I guess it remains to
be seen whether we can properly filter the huge amounts of information we can
now record and how far this data can impede in our lives.
Main References:
Rogers, Simon (2011) ‘Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it?’, The Guardian, Datablog, available at < http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/28/data-journalism >
Quilty-Harper, Conrad (2010) ’10 ways data is changing how we live’, The Telegraph, available at, < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7963311/10-ways-data-is-changing-how-we-live.html >
Wolf, Gary (2010) ‘The Data-Driven Life’, The New York Times, available at < http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html >
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