Grey Data Age

It is the best times, it is the worst of times;

It is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness;

It is the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity;

It is the season of Light, it was the season of darkness;

It is the spring of Hopenhagen, it was the winter of despair;

We had modifiable unreported us, we had nothing unreported us.

--"A Tale of NonBlank cities"

This is an era of information sharing everywhere, it seems that all software encourages us to share our information: ideas, photos, whereabouts, playlists, recipes, exercise, and so on, all the things you think of and do not expect, in a voluntary or involuntary way on the Internet, openly or quietly spread.

This reminds me of Zizek, the philosopher who had studied the capitalist society deeply, and thought that although it had all sorts of improper things, it avoided the people's transition and enjoyment, so that the public could keep the balance between work and enjoyment to some extent. You know, the need for excess will eventually fall into the whirlpool of hedonism, the progress of the productivity of the great harm. Late capitalism tried to avoid this, so self-discipline became the main theme of the society, which brought the greatest surplus value to capitalism.

The fact that capitalism squeezes surplus value in the digital network is an astonishing similarity in encouraging people to share as much of their personal information as possible. But there's a bit of digital networking and capitalism that's very different, it no longer seeks the balance between "private and public"-personal pleasures and productive development-to seek data without restriction, to tap into the hot spots in the vast data, to create what is called attention, and to develop the attention as a strategic resource. This is the basis of the current so-called attention economy.

Attention is an almost endless source of resources, but once it is open, it is difficult to control, whether public space or private space is actually a victim. Our brains have almost infinite power, which makes the balance of the capitalist era no longer effective, and we can almost subconsciously respond to anything on the web, which in the past has been almost impossible because of time and space. At the same time, the whole industry has to spend a lot of manpower and resources to develop such resources in depth, this development has not seen the limit.

Attention as a resource, both in terms of geographic breadth and breadth of its scope, is growing at a rapid pace, and this growth will continue with advances in theory and technology. Neuroscience has been used as a way to develop the next step, the recent boom in wearable equipment will also push the current attention economy to a new level, with the BRICS (Editor's note: five), but perhaps the authors take into account that South Africa's economic and market levels are too big for the rest of the four countries, Without it, the rapid development will be the next big source of attention resources.

However, these are not what fresh concepts, fresh is it caused by people's crazy pursuit of behavioral data and the pursuit of the use of the means, the means of collecting data increasingly covert, of course, increasingly sophisticated, this means has become a mainstream trend.

I call this data gray and you know it's not a good thing, but it has grown into an important role in technology and irreplaceable. Although the same data, but these gray data can not be seen, like the dark matter in the universe, we can only see the effects they have had, and they know nothing about themselves. Grey data is widely available, such as sudden stock market crashes, precise drone strikes, personalized advertising systems, personal credit records, and so on. Occasional data leaks can immediately arouse widespread scepticism in society, and many people believe that the data are highly likely to be abused.

Gray data is not as natural as most people think, and as with other data, it is generated by a certain amount of software or hardware, and it requires a broad infrastructure to support its operation. The following are some common grey data: The history of the browser, personal credit histories, high-frequency transactions, intelligence data collected in the name of the state, the raw data used by Facebook's new novelty sorting algorithm (edgerank), surveillance video, our IP address and access logs, All the communications records from phone calls to text messages, records of whereabouts, photos, fingerprints, even daily recipes, and, of course, medical records, and criminal record, were left behind when we used GPS.

Latour (Bruno Laour) argues that the fundamental character of modern society is contradictory, and that the argument surrounding grey data is a fundamental proof of this view, and if other proof is needed, we are not modern enough. Manuel Castells warns us that grey data divide people's understanding of social and personal relationships. On the one hand, we have already profoundly realized that the data is not independent natural existence, it attaches to the human existence, so its acquisition and use should be bound. (but entrepreneurs argue that gray data has virtually no real value for businesses, so no one analyzes and uses them.) But on the other hand, from activist Stewart Brand to the Pirate Party and the data-opening movement, the data itself is thought to have a lot of energy, and they strongly support that the data should be freely shared and used, and that efforts to promote social acceptance of a more open Data environment.

We are now in a situation of a tiger, one side is the freedom of information, while holding up the data should be used because of human beings. This situation is a typical manifestation of modern society.

To figure out the role of grey data in the whole of modern life, it is necessary to extend the scope of the discussion to the entire network (broad network, not just the Internet), the data itself can not exist alone, and can not affect the society alone, it requires other software/hardware support, such as TCP Protocol (one of the most fundamental transport protocols on the Internet). Data has penetrated deeply into every corner of our lives, making technology increasingly influential in society. All these phenomena are more divisive to the society's understanding of the data.

Now we have no choice but to accept the entangled state of the living creature and the data man, no longer have the difference between subject-object, everything is in a state of chaos. But this is a good time for us to take advantage of this state of being in depth to understand the nature of grey data, to understand its place in the vast web, its relationship to other objects, its role in empiricism (from EdgeRank to HFT), Its relationship with infrastructure (from the data center to the fiber-optic network), its spokesperson (from Wikipedia to Zuckerberg), its deep influence on the organization (from Google to London transportation system), its technical analysis of the help (from Hadoop to Storm). We will be able to trace the grey data and its ubiquitous influence.

In many ways, grey data and its surrounding facilities, like the drainage system of the 21st century, are easily overlooked but are an integral part of ensuring the normal functioning of society. It encompasses the desires that the public does not realize, and the social movements we cannot describe. Like the poison that breaks into the real world, every day exerts a subtle influence on us.

The gray data is the inevitable product of the technical society, it shows exponential growth trend, it is like the hot air in the ground crack, suddenly break into modern life. If we had the opportunity to look at it, we might be amazed at the extent to which it was involved.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)