To continue on the theme of last class, I think there\u2019s an underlying connection between the mp3 and so-called Big Data, and the technological tracks they occupy. The mp3 and similar digital container technologies have been rendered largely obsolete, at least in the sense of ownership, by streaming; Big Data techniques have ushered in a clustering paradigm, both as the sought-after piece of analytical knowledge and as the natural application of that analysis, a consequence of the ubiquity of data.<\/p>\n
How do we interact with streaming media? I think an instructive archetype is the Spotify playlist. No one\u2019s playlist has songs that someone else couldn\u2019t put in their own playlist, so the inherent meaning or value derives from the space\/genre\/cluster defined by the playlist\u2019s songs. In this zero-sum game, now that the ownership of music means little, the taste or preference or subculture-membership of the playlist creator takes on meaning (this meaning has always been present to some degree, but I think it can be argued that the meaning implied by music object ownership has traditionally suppressed it).<\/p>\n
How does Big Data analysis proceed? Broadly, by identifying meaning that isn\u2019t explained by any single observed variable.<\/p>\n
In both technological tracks we could pick out a similar shift\u2014when our pool of data (media content, data in the scientific sense) reaches such a level of omnipresence that everyone pretty much has access to the same set, we try to determine the latent space that remains now that the noise of our informational infrastructure has become peripheral and no longer creates space of its own (although this space will surely have lasting implications), and then we try to settle into it.<\/p>\n
It actually seems like the Editor-in-Chief of Wired had a point in emphasizing that \u201cwe can track and measure [what people do] with unprecedented fidelity,\u201d and that to be able to do this endangers the utility of fields that cluster people by hand, as it were. To be sure, the numbers don\u2019t speak for themselves, but for the most part they do display themselves silently in full public view.<\/p>\n
This also seems like an unstated reason for boyd and Crawford to adopt the idea, from boyd\u2019s previous work with Alice Marwick, that \u201cbeing in public\u201d is distinct from \u201cbeing public.\u201d How do we describe spaces that are both public and private? We could imagine a vast, unfenced, latent field (for boyd and Crawford, a park) on which groups of people cluster together for social interaction. Anyone could visit any cluster, but distance between clusters makes such travel difficult. Privacy scales with distance (which we could say scales inversely with the number of public data points about a cluster), so it\u2019s no longer a binary concept. This is why Zack\u2019s point last class is crucial\u2014he said we\u2019ve reached a point where our data is basically fully \u201cout there,\u201d and the only thing mediating a dox is effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To continue on the theme of last class, I think there\u2019s an underlying connection between the mp3 and so-called Big Data, and the technological tracks they occupy. The mp3 and similar digital container technologies have been rendered largely obsolete, at least in the sense of ownership, by streaming; Big Data techniques have ushered in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2977,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2977"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4443"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4451,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions\/4451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}