Data and media - a story of unrequited love? It would seem quite a logical assumption that media and data would go hand in hand, but is this relationship as peachy as it seems? Whilst media and data can work together, both represent different entities in the global landscape. It could be argued, by some, that modern media is lacking in data. Modern media is often criticised for being 'churnalism'; a series of soft, pre-packaged stories produced by a 'McJournalism' industry of media production. Whilst data presents an audience with a complex set of facts and theories of which they need to understand. However, as The Guardian article highlights, data journalism (the love child of media and data?) has been around for years, centuries even. The unrequited love between media and data seems to be a reflection of the changing media environment in which the data that the media is receiving is not common knowledge; it's personal data, it's our data, it's the data that makes us who we are in a data-driven world. And sometimes it's data we don't want exposed.
One of the most interesting dynamics between media and data is the amount of data we can release through media. On social networking sites, through blogs, when we comment on news articles, we divulge small pieces of our personal data through the media. The article from Science Blogs explores how we can track and manage our own actions and responses by revealing our data in the media. We can track what music we listen to, and then have a program tell us what music we will subsequently enjoy based on the data we have provided. The obvious problem with this is the growing issue of privacy. When we leak data about ourselves, what other organisations can access that data, and where does it go? If your music listening habits can create an entire tracking of albums specifically directed at you, then what else happens to your (more important) data once it is in the media? The New York Times Article interestingly explores the relationship between people, their data and the media as it looks at the lives of individuals who record all 'life events' (from ideas to how much coffee they drink) and questions the behaviours of people who lead data-driven lives. In conjunction, The Telegraph article shows how entire sections of human life (including relationships, education and even how we shop) have been dramatically altered by how we use, manipulate and share data. The major qualm with modern media and data is that to access media we have to give over some of our data. If we don't we can't access the services necessary to function in the modern world. Catch 22.
This topic links in quite closely to my proposed research topic. I want to explore the amount of data we produce and display to the world, who accesses this data, and what happens to it. This relationship between data and people is an interesting one as people want to access the data that belongs to other people, but at the same time, are desperate to keep their own data private. This creates an interesting dichotomy of responses to data which demonstrate the impact data has on our mediated world.
This video quite interestingly visualises the data in media, taken from the recorded searches and online behaviours of Google users:
References
Lehrer, Jonah (2010) ‘Self-Tracking’, May 3, The Frontal Cortex, <http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/05/self-tracking.php>
Wolf, Gary (2010) ‘The Data-Driven Life’, The New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html>
Quilty-Harper, Conrad (2010) ’10 ways data is changing how we live’, The Telegraph, August 25, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7963311/10-ways-data-is-changing-how-we-live.html>
Rogers, Simon (2011) ‘Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it?’, The Guardian, Datablog, July 28, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/28/data-journalism>
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