Sooner or later I was bound to find some other Semanticists in Canada and on Thursday I attended a Semantic Web meetup in Montreal. The audience was small, but that led to more of a group discussion atmosphere than a formal talk. The presenter, Dr Joan Yess Kahn, has coined the term Indiverse – Individual Information Universe – to facilitate her thinking about the set of personal information and data that we accumulate through our lives.
She pointed out that some of this information is created by us, some about us, some with our knowledge and consent, some without, and our entire digital lives can be stolen and abused. She made some interesting observations about how our personal and public information spaces were essentially one and the same before the industrial revolution, when most people’s work and home lives were intertwined (e.g. artisans living in their workshops), and that changes such as the industrial revolution and public education split those apart as people left home to work somewhere else. However, in the information age more people are returning to working from home while others are increasingly using their computers at work to carry out personal tasks, such as online shopping.
This blurring of the public and private has many social and commercial implications. We discussed the potential monetary value of personal attention and intention data to advertisers, and implications for surveillance of individuals by governments and other organizations.
We also talked about information overload and information anxiety. Joan has written about ways of categorizing, indexing, and managing our personal information – our address books, calendars, to do lists, etc. – and this led us to consider ideas of how to construct sharable, standardized Personal Data Lockers (for example The Locker Project) and to take back control of our online identity and information management, for example in shifting from Customer Relations Management (CRM) to Vendor Relations Management (VRM).
In previous posts I have talked about our need to become our own personal digital archivists as well and I was sent a link by Mark to a Personal API developed by Naveen. This takes personal information curation to the data level, as Naveen is seeking an easy way to manage the huge amounts of data that he generates simply by being a person in the world – his fitness routines, diet, etc.
There is a clear convergence here with the work done by such medical innovators as Patients Know Best electronic patient health records. Moral and social implications of who is responsible for curating and protecting such data are huge and wide-ranging. At the moment doting parents using apps to monitor their babies or fitness enthusiasts using apps (such as map my run etc.) are doing this for fun, but will we start seeing this as a social duty? Will we have right-wing campaigns to deny treatment to people who have failed to look after their health data or mass class actions to sue hospitals that get hacked? If you think biometric passports are information dense, just wait until every heartbeat from ultrasound to grave is encoded somewhere in your Indiverse.
I think some interesting questions will arise as the process of data gathering becomes more ubiquitous, e.g. Google glass and embeddable technology. For example will future law allow us to withhold our personally gathered data from, say, government and other authorities or are we headed for a virtual panopticon?
…and almost right on cue: that’s not personal information, that’s metadata:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/phone-call-metadata-information-authorities
I had wished to attend the meetup mentioned as well, but something else intervened. Some worthy points are brought up in this post. There are two general areas about which I’d like to see more discussion some time, either at the meetup or elsewhere:
First, it intrigues me that semanticists are attracted to this topic, and I’d like to explore their vantage points more. Because in general, I see the conglomerating of massive data streams as moving in the opposite direction from ‘meaning’ towards ‘information’, in other words a kind of reductionism of meaning or true semantic content. (My own relations to Semantics are rooted in the theoretical linguistics of 30-40 years ago, when Semanticists were trying to disentangle their field from the shackles of Generative syntax.)
Second, I’m happy to see concern for the idea of reclaiming ownership, to some extent at least, of our apparently economically valuable personal data streams. I would like for their to be some consideration of Jaron Lanier’s recent ideas in this direction. They can be explored via many web video lectures or accessed in his new book “Who Owns the Future”.
Thanks Rob – good points. I guess information without meaning is pretty useless, and I worry that if Big Data processing takes place without paying attention to meaning it can be worse than useless, and actively dangerous.
As for personal data, in the early days of Facebook, people told me what a wonderful benevolent character Mark Zuckerberg was, and how he wasn’t interested in money, he just wanted everyone to be friends and make the world a better place, and of course we could all trust him implicitly. I think in the future, being data savvy will be the equivalent of being financially savvy – if you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll be taken advantage of one way or another!