The database is a double-edged sword. On the one hand the database has had a huge effect on the development of digital technology, but on the other hand, it opened the door to a wide variety of implications on our culture on a personal level. Gere’s book pointed out that the emergence of digital technologies, like the tabulating machine that helped make the Census possible, makes people “visible as pieces of data” (42).
That visibility definitely spills over into the projects we’re examining this week. The interviews, photos, videos, and stories submitted to these projects are turned into pieces of data. This is especially evident when those submissions are turned into points on a map in the hurricane project. The submissions to projects like these can be manipulated to fit the theme of the project. I’m not saying that is what is occurring here, but within the system of the database, the personal can simply become a point of data.
I have been a huge fan of the PostSecret project for a long time. This project in a way challenges the idea that people are visible pieces of data. While their secrets become public, their identities are projected. In protecting the identities of people it may allow us to empathize more with just the raw emotion that is being projected in the pieces displayed on the site. The posts are not really organized categorically, and aren’t transformed into sets of data along theme lines. Does this make it less of a piece of data?
Emily: I appreciate the dilemma you illustrate with database projects and the issue of information. On one hand, information is offered on an individual level, to help recreate the story of Katrina, for example, but by the end of it, a digital metanarrative is created that that individual story helped shape, whether that was the person’s intention or not. It’s like there are two separate storylines that are created when creating archives and story databases digitally: one is the personal, and then there’s the inherent ability to extrapolate data to create the impersonal story. I think there’s a legitimate question of consent with regard to this. PostSecret, for example, could do a data analysis of all of their submissions, and determine the “issues” most prevalent amongst their population. It becomes problematic, however, if we start to extrapolate lessons from the democracy project. The people the author had access to interview, and the nature of his questions, determined a certain type of response which may not be accurate when extrapolated out.
What do folks think about the issue of consent with regard to digital data culled from personal stories? Is the very nature of allowing yourself to be interviewed for an internet-based project, or uploading a story, a go ahead to use your data in other ways?
This is an interesting issue that non-fiction media makers must struggle with ethically. Jenkins, etc. discuss the work of Brave New Films (Robert Greenwald, producer) who free up their raw media and finished films for free re-use.
And look here at today’s Hollywood Reporter with:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alex-gibney-fires-back-at-657677
Alex Gibney Fires Back at Julian Assange’s attack on his film “We Steal Secrets,” where Assange and supporters re-annotate the script and circulate this reposte online.
It is so exciting how the issues you all are laying out here are actually in play with high stakes implications in the broader, messier and ethically challenged media space.
One thing I’ve wondered about related to this is the oft-debated issue of privacy. On the one hand, privacy allows you to carry on doing whatever you like when nobody’s watching…on the other, the lack of privacy forces people’s eccentricities out into the open and, I would argue, challenges traditional expectations of conformity. Is it useful, then, to have data on people’s darkest secrets? Is there a way to do this digitally that isn’t dehumanizing? I think I still have more questions than answers.