All items
The data is the medium
During the London Mayoral race I did a search for Ken (Livingston) and Boris (Johnson) on Summize, a search engine which measures the pulse of conversations on Twitter. 99% of comments were pro-Ken, yet Boris won. Beyond a probable (possible) digital divide, the point is about perception. My view of reality is shaped (and often distorted) by perception; by how reality is filtered to me.
“Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done”
So begins Yochai Benkler’s “The Wealth of Networks”.
Most moments of change come with both a challenge and an opportunity, but above all change often comes with inevitable consequences. Change is not linear, it’s chaotic and the new finally becomes stable well after the old is obsolete.
Debating the online against the offline is naive. Discussing the validity of Wikipedia entries is boring. William Gibson confuses us. Cyberspace is not a parallel universe, the online complements and often augmentates real world dynamics.
Clay Shirky brilliantly summarizes this: to a four-year old a television without a mouse is broken.
Change is systemic.
Leveraging and embracing this opportunity, and understanding its applicability for societal development is what should excite us. The inevitable consequence could then become a better world.
The point, in a nutshell, is how information is exchanged is crucial and we have an unprecedented opportunity in enabling and empowering this exchange.
The challenge of course is that data is dispersed and unevenly distributed across multiple platforms and formats, both online and offline: across social networks, in Government departments, in universities, research agencies, the imagination of a reporter etc. etc. etc…
Between the opportunities and the challenges though lies one question that begs for an answer: why is data (especially that relevant to public and societal interest) so often not free?
And more importantly, why do so many hold their little patches of data hidden away in ivory towers, instead of enabling talented people to use it for good?
This is less about data portability and interoperability, and the need for “users” to be able to control and take their personal information and “social graph” with them. That too is an important debate, yet this is not about portability of privacy settings, registration information, contacts and profile fields, it’s about setting free the critical relevancy of data within information flows on a far grander scale.
In a planet haunted by pressing issues we need to think bigger, and much, much more radically.
Perception of reality is shaped by the insights at our disposal: data is the medium.
Insights into “reality” drive and influence research, reform, decisions and ultimately the effectivness of action that can hopefully make the world a better place.
The implications are therefore practical, and range from costs being constantly duplicated (the same survey or focus group repeated again and again), waste of resources that further pave the road of good intentions, market inefficiencies abund, but above all the consequences are societal: any intended postive outcome dependent on information and on data (i.e. possibly 99% of all human action and interaction) generates less positive impact that it could.
This is important, at times it can even mean finding loved ones after a humanitarian crisis.
The relevance of this paradigm is vast, and there are some great, and quite diverse, examples of data which is leveraged or which if set free could be valuably used:
In health;
In real estate
To fight crime in Brazil ; in Chicago ; in Oakland ; and in Manchester
To enable information to reach the Burmese people in their native Sahana
To profile and understand a city
To improve traffic conditions
In multiple contexts
In music.
Some of these examples enable their data to be used, others mash-up openly accessible data while some are more or less eye-candy (the data is not accessible).
At UnLtdWorld we’re profoundly committed to contributing to the realization of this potential, which is why we developed the UnLtdWorld Research Lab the world’s first mapping of social entrepreneurship to integrate deeply into a social network. The aim of the research Lab is to provide critical social insight to anyone, no matter their size.
We will soon release all the data in the Lab and make it openly accessible for comparative and historical analysis, and dynamically usable with other datasets and within mashups and applications anywhere on the web.
2gether08 is a great opportunity to act as a call for data and information flows to be more open and widely used, and to foster a systemic shift that is creative and imaginative - to showcase good practices that are making a difference in many markets and fields, and to bring together key players at all levels: not only the creative talent and passionate do-ers, but also those organisations and groups that (at times unknowingly) typically gatekeep data that could be valuably used, and together lower the noise-level around the trivial, and in its place foster an open exchange towards cooperation that aims to create real value, and lasting impact on real issues.
Tags: Discussion
7 comments for “The data is the medium”
Post a comment
Content on this site is Creative Commons Share-Alike unless otherwise stated.
Contact information
© 2008 2gether08. 
This synopsis of a 1996 academic paper will be found on my website link. It makes the case for a compassionate business approach to ending world poverty driven by information accessibility:
“The Industrial Age is now giving way to the Information Revolution, which is giving rise to the Information Age. Understanding this, it is appropriate to be concerned with the impact this transition is having and will continue to have on the lives of all of us. In that it is a fundamental predicate of “people-centered” economic development that no person is disposable, it follows that close attention be paid to those in the waning Industrial Age who are not equipped and prepared to take active and productive roles in an Information Age. Many, in fact, are scared, angry, and deeply resentful that they are being left out, ignored, effectively disenfranchised, discarded, thrown away as human flotsam in the name of human and social progress. We have only to ask ourselves individually whether or not this is the sort of progress we want, where we accept consciously and intentionally that human progress allows for disposing of other human beings.”
Ten years on, the same philosophy based on the principle of enlightened self-interest find support from economists such as Muhammad Yunus with social business, industry leaders in Bill Gates and creative captalism and in strategic think tanks with the concept of Smart Power in foreign policy. In a recent session of Ted talks, economist Paul Collier refers to the original Marshall Plan, in the context of enlightened self interest and the need for strengthening civil society and transparency.
We have to look past the contemporary perception that widgets and social networking will leverage these things in their own right. We are falling over ourselves funding one network after another in competition and as in the words of Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’ we hear “ten thousand whispering and nobody listening”
It takes activism, standing up to the thugs and bandits who don’t see past numbers.
Yes - the data is the medium - I completely agree about the strength of Twitter with the perception of public opinion. On Twitter you would have felt that only idiots voted for Boris Johnson and that no one knew anyone who did. I “knew” many people who did. My blog received regular comments from many people who had voted for Boris and very much resented my pro Ken approach. I reminded them that I was a blogger and not a newspaper or broadcaster and had the right to express my own personal opinions on my blog. What I’m trying to say is that my blog covers a popularist subject (The Tube) yet because it’s online I’m interested in more geeky stuff (Twitter).
I have never felt more political in my life after seeing the results in London and the attitude that many many people had on the internet and I experienced much of my “knowledge” of what what going on through social networks. Mainly because I felt that I could trust them more than the political owners of major newspapers.
It’s true I used my site’s traffic to try to put across my opinions. It was a case of “To thine own self be true”. I got a lot of private rascist hate mail as a result but I decided it was worth the battle. I also used tools such as London Votematch to help the many undecided people come to a decision about who should get their second vote.
I still don’t personally see myself as an activist though. I see myself as someone who became very disillusioned by London for a while. I see myself as someone who was lucky enough to be writing about a popular topic and to have a lot of media interest in the fact that I was writing about a popular topic (if that makes sense).
I fully agree with Clay Shirky’s premise in that internet is allowing us to mobilise ourselves in a way like never before.
But we need to do it in a way that’s truly engaging to the public and uses social networks as they do themselves. I worry whether quoting tracts from academic books and going back to our University dissertation days is the right way to do this.
Annie,
There’s a point I’m trying to make above that I think you’ve missed. Quoting an academic tract for it’s own sake wasn’t my intention. Rather, to illustrate that the concepts being put across in ‘The Wealth of Networks’ have been circulating on the web for a decade as open source ideas, delivered by activists who haven’t hidden away anything in ivory towers, but wanting to deliver information for humanity without claiming copyright.
As a web activist of some years standing, I can offer examples of how this has enabled us to penetrate some of the darkest conditions of existence brought about by corruption and to catalyse change.
What we risk, I believe is in branding for mass consumption to monetise, that which is earnest activism will be drowned out by trivia, as evidenced by media like Facebook. Worse still, as both of us have experienced to some degree, this will power to those who smear and abuse through anonymity with the intention of diluting the message and defaming the messenger.
Those who try to remain true to themselves, will be howled down by mobs orchestrated by sockpuppets seeding misinformation to achieve a political or financial objective.
Believe me, I’ve been there and registered the indifference from those that would be activists.
Thanks for the comments!
Annie: totally agree with your “But we need to do it in a way that’s truly engaging to the public and uses social networks as they do themselves. I worry whether quoting tracts from academic books and going back to our University dissertation days is the right way to do this.”
An interesting piece on TechCrunch: can Google Trends predict the election? Reminded me of the Summize experiment mentioned in the piece: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/07/can-google-trends-predict-the-election/
I’m as big a fan of free data (and what emerges from that freedom) as the next person; once I had to re-draw a whole load of maps for a book because of ruddy Ordnance Survey…so agree with much of the above. And, of course, the online world interacts with and complements and mobilises and augments the real world in the various ways you outline.
I’m also a strong advocate and believer, as you know, in the power of new technology to facilitate / improve / streamline / assist social change.
But, when we invest so much time and effort (and money) into online initiatives, we have to measure their impact, as we do with offline initiatives. I have that debate constantly within SSE to justify resourcing (human + £) our online activities.
My beef is when the technology moves from being a MEANS to an end to being an END in itself. It’s not a luddite or naive position to ask for that to be in the back of everyone’s minds at such events. The potential is enormous; but so is the potential to be distracted.
Absolutely agree with Nick’s comment: technology is an enable, not an end in itself.
I think the key point is to look at the goal/impact: how access to the right information can be used to add value/impact, and how technology can faciliate and enable such an impact.
Some of the examples in the post aim to spotlight the potential; for example in terms of battling crime or in terms of making content available to minorities.