Re: <nettime> Proposition on Peak Data (John Preston)

hi John and nettimers

just a small corrective: you describe data as 'intentionally gathered', which seems okay, and not inapprpriately extended to non-human intentions as in the case of the fuel gauge. My car-driving knowledge is limited (the equivalent is probably how much I crave a coffee after ten kms on the bike) but the gauges I remember were analog pointers. There are differences with numerical counters but we can overlook.

The problem is not with the indication of how much fuel is left in the tank when I glance at the gauge. The first problem lies with storage: gathering and keeping every reading the gauge has ever made. This is the initial problem of 'peak data': how much of this captured and stored data is of value and to whom or, more broadly, to what. (My answer is - to the corporate cyborgs of the oil industry but that's another marginal issue for this discussion - it may be over-simplifying to say it is 'presented to the driver' if the indicator is not just pointing but gathering)

The second problem is that the stored data (let's call it information at this stage in its life) isn't in ert: it is actively processed in relation to other data. That might be a surveillance issue, again not something that worries me unduly in the peak data discussion. It's the new problem of information produced by processing stored data to produce more information for further processing ....

two issues here: (a) that the second, third, fourth etcetera order information is less and less close to the world the first data gathering touched and (b) there is more and more information produced from the first dataset, far more than the entire population could look at if it spent 8 hours a day in heavy rotation looking at it, and with no end in sight.

I was discussing the previous post on indigenous artefacts piled in storage - in their case not generating information; perhaps generating ignorance; or perhaps - they warn me - being made available to people who should never see them. That post ended with the suggestion that those artefacts should be left in the ground. I'm told that many traditional owners have contacted collections to request that the artefacts they house should be destroyed.

that's a terrible thing for an archivist. But perhaps it is time to start destroying the insane Borgesian archives of adta and information

[I made some proposals about the capture, storage and processing of social media imaging in my book Anecdotal Evidence which I recommend everyone goes out and buys at least two copies of]

For example, we may consider the fuel gauge in a car. The tank contains fuel, and we install a system which can measure the volume of fuel in the tank, and connect this to a dial on the dashboard, and so the data on the current fuel availablity of the car is generated by the interaction of the fuel tank, fuel in the tank, and the measurement system, and it is presented to the driver via the dial.