After our discussion on Tuesday in regard to health data I realized that the way in which we, as Americans, experience healthcare is a lot like the breakdown of data. What I mean is that we have created specialty doctors for different body systems, much like the idea of datafied power in the Ruckstein and Schull piece. We start with a general practitioner where an overview of our ailments and symptoms and diagnoses are kept. This is our go-to health provider in times of need, they know the basics of our health. But, once a diagnosis becomes specified, we are referred to a different doctor that concentrates on the area of the diagnosis/ailment. We share more specified data, more symptoms with this doctor, and create a different picture of ourselves in order to better understand who we are as a person. This is much like the way that we portray ourselves through data in the digital age. Each data outlet allows us to explore different areas of who we are.  Yet, health is fluid and a person’s physical state is everchanging so that how they are at one moment could be drastically different from the next. I started writing this post and I felt fine but now as I write this sentence my vision is blurring and I am starting to go into a migraine. The data we produce is merely a small snippet of who we are at one moment and while it rings true for that one moment, the data is fragile and has the ability to change in an instant and no longer be a representation of an individual’s reality anymore. I think that this realization can connect back to the idea of ethnography. If we think of doing ethnographic work much like a specialty doctor, we are able to see that the data we collect is merely a snippet of localized symptoms of culture. We will never be able to get at the whole picture and we will only be able to analyze the symptoms which the individuals provide to us but we hone in on what we are provided with. I do hope this makes sense because now I can’t see but I am thinking back to Geertz.