Week 6 - Data and Media - An unrequited love?

There is an undeniable link between data and media. They co-exist and through each other raise ideas about information and the meaning that they try to get across. Although through this, there seems to be an ongoing transfer between natural data and data that is existent within technical systems, that can be comparable to last weeks idea of the World Clock. There is constant relationship evident between things that are natural, with things that are not, and it is dependant on us and our bodies (and through the media that we posses) to adapt to this change or to reject it.

The exchange of data that we receive and send off exemplifies this relationship and how through this media comes between and in a way mediates and changes our perception of how to live in conjunction to these events and processes. Think of how we interpret meteorological data in a daily way. Usually, we arrange ourselves around the day (if it's planned to rain then we leave earlier, if it's hot and sunny we wear something cooler) and in the middle of this experience is the media; informing us of these changes through news reports and channel's dedicated to the weather. The way in which we perceive these events and relationships which differs from one another, although doesn't deny that data and media are a numbers game, depending on the past to see how it will affect the future. We argue about how to interpret the evidence, finding flaws in earlier interpretations. And we keeping changing... know about the past, depends on who we are now (Edwards 2010: 17) Through this we know that data has enabled us to draw these conclusions and re-arrange our lives around the natural but also around figures of data that arrange our lives.

Our media ecologies have certain characteristics that we introduce into our lives, but also that influence us to re-arranging ourselves in a particular order around them; co-existing, in a way. They help to create a notion of a new reality in which we live through and has contributed in making our experience, in which media plays a foundational part in; acting as a relationship between our experience and the world. Data and media complement each other in supporting not only facts but also in that they share the same qualities in how we as humans arrange ourselves and our lives around them.

References

Edwards, P.N. (2010). Introduction. In: A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Massachusetts:: The MIT Press. p17.