Big Bang Data
On 9 January, Breda and I went to see Big Bang Data, an exhibition at Somerset House in London. The tagline is "Art, Selfies and Surveillance," which I'd say is a fair description. It examines how our ability to generate, gather and analyse vast quantities of data has exploded in the last few years, and what implications that has for individuals and societies.
In 2009, humanity produced more data than we had produced in the whole of our history up to that point. By 2012, it was estimated that we produce 2.5 exabytes every day, or about 2.5 quintillion bytes. (A quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) These sorts of numbers are hard to even comprehend. One exhibit comes from an artist who asked Twitter users to post a tweet during a particular second of a particular day. About 5000 people took part. The artist printed the results, and they occupy four books, each as thick as a dictionary. (Though he seems to have included everybody's profile picture as well as the actual tweets, some of which were also pictures instead of text.)
I found the exhibition a bit of a mixed bag. The presentation and layout aren't great - some pieces are too spread out, wasting space, while others are crammed together. I didn't care for most of the art pieces, finding them meaningless or trivial. (Though I should point out that I have a very low opinion of most of what passes for art nowadays. It's only a matter of time before I'll be thrown out of the Tate Modern for ruining other visitors' enjoyment by laughing...)
The pieces that try to do something with publicly-available data are more interesting, though I was surprised at how little processing the computer does in most cases. The interest comes mainly from the fact that some type of data is available that wasn't available before, and there's a lot of it. For instance, there's one map that tries to work out how happy or sad London is at the present moment. It looks at Twitter and Instagram posts that have geographical coordinates indicating they were posted in London, and then searches them for words that probably indicate the poster was happy or sad when they made the post. It doesn't attempt to understand the meaning of the post, and so could be quite badly misled by sarcasm and irony. I suppose the thinking is that most people won't do that sort of thing (or not deliberately, anyway), and so if you can gather enough posts, the average will usually be quite close to the truth.
It's not stated whether the creators took account of how the demographics differ between "the set of all Londoners" and "the set of all Londoners who have an Internet-connected device that can geotag their posts and have a Twitter or Instagram account and make posts to it that can reveal how they're feeling." If you assume they're the same, you could be in for a nasty shock if you use the map to make any important decisions. (Remind me to tell you sometime about the racist pothole detector app...)
There's a big section on how data can be misused and abused, whose centrepiece is a video about the Edward Snowden revelations. The main thrust of this is that the various government spying programmes are illegal under the Fourth Amendment to the US constitution. I'm not sure how much that means to your average visitor to a British museum. (For that matter, I wonder how many Americans could tell you what it means without looking it up...)
An off-the-wall idea towards the end is that we might be less upset about companies and governments using our data if they had to pay us for the privilege. It has a little app where you can construct a dummy license that says who can do what with your personal data and how much they have to pay you. It talks about using blockchain (the technology that underpins Bitcoin) for tracking and enforcement, but it's not clear what would stop a dishonest person or organisation from copying your data out of that system and into an unrestricted one, where they could sell it against your wishes. It's also not clear why a company that decided to use this system wouldn't simply recover the money they paid you by charging higher prices (and then spin it as "tell us everything about yourself and get a discount!") On the other hand, if the system becomes widespread, it might prompt companies to think about what data they actually need, and what data makes a difference to their profits and customer satisfaction, rather than vacuuming up everything it's not actually illegal for them to collect. (It wouldn't stop the likes of the NSA, because what they're doing is already illegal, and they know it's illegal, and they don't care.)
Overall, the exhibition is thought-provoking, if a little uneven. I may have expected too much of it, as I've already come across many of the concepts and issues in online articles and in the course of my job. If you're not an IT specialist or a spy, you might find it eye-opening. Tickets are £12.50 for adults, and the exhibition runs until 20 March 2016.
In 2009, humanity produced more data than we had produced in the whole of our history up to that point. By 2012, it was estimated that we produce 2.5 exabytes every day, or about 2.5 quintillion bytes. (A quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) These sorts of numbers are hard to even comprehend. One exhibit comes from an artist who asked Twitter users to post a tweet during a particular second of a particular day. About 5000 people took part. The artist printed the results, and they occupy four books, each as thick as a dictionary. (Though he seems to have included everybody's profile picture as well as the actual tweets, some of which were also pictures instead of text.)
I found the exhibition a bit of a mixed bag. The presentation and layout aren't great - some pieces are too spread out, wasting space, while others are crammed together. I didn't care for most of the art pieces, finding them meaningless or trivial. (Though I should point out that I have a very low opinion of most of what passes for art nowadays. It's only a matter of time before I'll be thrown out of the Tate Modern for ruining other visitors' enjoyment by laughing...)
The pieces that try to do something with publicly-available data are more interesting, though I was surprised at how little processing the computer does in most cases. The interest comes mainly from the fact that some type of data is available that wasn't available before, and there's a lot of it. For instance, there's one map that tries to work out how happy or sad London is at the present moment. It looks at Twitter and Instagram posts that have geographical coordinates indicating they were posted in London, and then searches them for words that probably indicate the poster was happy or sad when they made the post. It doesn't attempt to understand the meaning of the post, and so could be quite badly misled by sarcasm and irony. I suppose the thinking is that most people won't do that sort of thing (or not deliberately, anyway), and so if you can gather enough posts, the average will usually be quite close to the truth.
It's not stated whether the creators took account of how the demographics differ between "the set of all Londoners" and "the set of all Londoners who have an Internet-connected device that can geotag their posts and have a Twitter or Instagram account and make posts to it that can reveal how they're feeling." If you assume they're the same, you could be in for a nasty shock if you use the map to make any important decisions. (Remind me to tell you sometime about the racist pothole detector app...)
There's a big section on how data can be misused and abused, whose centrepiece is a video about the Edward Snowden revelations. The main thrust of this is that the various government spying programmes are illegal under the Fourth Amendment to the US constitution. I'm not sure how much that means to your average visitor to a British museum. (For that matter, I wonder how many Americans could tell you what it means without looking it up...)
An off-the-wall idea towards the end is that we might be less upset about companies and governments using our data if they had to pay us for the privilege. It has a little app where you can construct a dummy license that says who can do what with your personal data and how much they have to pay you. It talks about using blockchain (the technology that underpins Bitcoin) for tracking and enforcement, but it's not clear what would stop a dishonest person or organisation from copying your data out of that system and into an unrestricted one, where they could sell it against your wishes. It's also not clear why a company that decided to use this system wouldn't simply recover the money they paid you by charging higher prices (and then spin it as "tell us everything about yourself and get a discount!") On the other hand, if the system becomes widespread, it might prompt companies to think about what data they actually need, and what data makes a difference to their profits and customer satisfaction, rather than vacuuming up everything it's not actually illegal for them to collect. (It wouldn't stop the likes of the NSA, because what they're doing is already illegal, and they know it's illegal, and they don't care.)
Overall, the exhibition is thought-provoking, if a little uneven. I may have expected too much of it, as I've already come across many of the concepts and issues in online articles and in the course of my job. If you're not an IT specialist or a spy, you might find it eye-opening. Tickets are £12.50 for adults, and the exhibition runs until 20 March 2016.
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