Week 6 - Code, Data and Media - a Complicated Relationship

Data collection and mining has become so ingrained into our society that we don’t even notice its presence, but would most likely notice its absence. Data is collected from our everyday lives and habits; it is then collated and given to various companies and organisations in order to hone the information we receive or to alter the way in which we interact (Harper, 2010). For instance, Google logs our searches and interests in order to both create the ‘suggested search’ predictive feature which makes searching simpler and to place more appealing and personalised advertisements on the internet pages we view. This has expanded to our entire use of the internet, if you search for a band on Google, the next time you go onto YouTube, their music videos or anything related to that band will be suggested to you (Huffington Post, 2012).Any user can check how many companies are using collected data from their internet history, through the use of the visualisation add-on Collusion. However, whilst people have the ability to see how many companies are collecting their information, there is still no way to stop these companies from doing so (Madrigal, 2012). This leads to the question: is data collection a bad thing or a good thing? Data collection clearly has negative connotations attributed to it (Madrigal, 2012), yet there can be points made about the value it adds to the study of our society. For instance, data collection can help us understand various aspects of the world and life around us. It allows us to study things such as the popularity of flight paths. 
Data collection can be used to allow us to better understand the intricacies of society. Through works such as these, we can study our interactions with one another and with the world, and can therefore explore why we behave the way we do and the way in which people think.
References:Harper, C 2010, ’10 Ways Data is Changing How We Live’, The Telegraph, 25 August, accessed April 7 2014

‘Google Merging User Data To Improve Experience, Help Advertisers’ Huffington Post, January 24, accessed April 7 2014

Madrigal, A 2012, ‘I’m Being Followed: How Google- and 104 Other Companies- Are Tracking Me On The Web’, The Atlantic, February 29, accessed April 7 2014