I was really intrigued by the MP3 piece this week, especially with respect to the concept of selling an experience. I am honestly still struggling to wrap my head around this (I just think it’s really cool), but the line that stuck out to me from Sterne’s piece was: “If sound is not ‘out there’ but rather created by the process of perception, then the mp3 is not a simulation of sound or a virtual sound. It is simply another mode through which the effect of sound is produced and embodiment is the defining characteristic of the experience.” He then goes on to say, “The point of recording and reproduction is not to mirror sound but to shape it actively.”

I really liked when Zack said in class that Big Data is not a concrete, fixed “thing,” but an interactive or dialogical process. It makes me think about all these 0’s and 1’s differently, or I guess data in general; in order for the data to serve its purpose or to represent what it’s encoded to represent, we– as humans with mechanisms of interpretation (i.e. auditory perception)– have to meet the data halfway. The mp3 is not a standalone “thing” either. It encodes the effect of sound, as Sterne says, but makes us do the work to interpret it as music. Could the same thing be said for data? I guess, right? This brings me back to the privileging of context. On the most rudimentary level, a set of data points has meaning unless a key, a scale, or a set of corresponding values is given. These contextual cues and the interpretation they amount to are like Sterne’s “effect of sound.” In fact, they’re more than that– they’re greater than just the sum of their parts: they create a physical, embodied experience. It requires our brains, as active interpreting machines, to interact with these concrete entities that would otherwise have no real significance. I feel like I just rewrote my midterm essay, but I’m interested in how much “mythology” as Boyd and Crawford referenced in their piece, is a factor in these things we label as objective, digital, and non-human. Since when did data and technology become associated with objectivity?