Complete report online at CJR, or downloadable in ebook formats at gitbook.
Style Guide for Writing About Technology and Annotated Syllabus are also available on Medium. I welcome your comments, additions, and further suggestions.

Being Stateside meant I got to pull together some of the people who inspired and motivated the research for a panel discussion in New York. It was a great chance to highlight some of their contributions and insights about how tech coverage and criticism are changing. Here’s the video, featuring all stars Virginia Heffernan, John Herrman, and Rose Eveleth.

It’s just barely been a week since we published and I’m eagerly watching the response to what turned out to be a pretty lengthy project (30K words, including appendices!). Working largely on my own from Singapore, it was easy to lose touch with the energy that motivated the project. There's nothing like the thrill of pressing 'publish' and getting feedback to motivate further work. On Twitter people are screenshotting a surprising range of quotes and insights from the report and even posting links to it alongside commentary in other languages. I love seeing what resonates, and I’m pleased to see folks are actually reading that deep into the report.

https://t.co/5uSk969BoN pic.twitter.com/Y1NiEmxjO4

— Paul Ford (@ftrain) October 5, 2016

I’m especially excited because friends and colleagues have shared with me how this thing connects to their own work. I did not expect, for example, it would speak to my friends’ recent thinking on middle school English literature canon and pedagogy! I intended to corral a bunch of different threads and ideas together in one place so we could start having a conversation around them. It’s gratifying to see hints that it is already delivering on that potential.

It's all the more personally gratifying when the seeds of this project began as an exercise in soul searching: “What should I call myself? ‘Tech Writer’ doesn’t cut it.” Surrounded by lawyers, academics, documentary film makers, and journalists, I struggled to pin down how to introduce myself in those heady September introductory days starting as a fellow at Berkman in 2013. The soul searching continued the following year as a writing collaboration fell apart, for reasons that seemed to highlight the differences in our approach. Where there are struggles and uncertainty, there's usually something interesting worth digging into, and my personal struggle led me to exploring bigger tensions in the way we write and talk about technology and society at large.

I’m using the next couple days for jetlag-fueled musings and lining up my next steps to figure out how this work continues and evolves, in practice or in theory. Absentee ballots have been sent. Back in steamy Singapore I'm already missing fall, but I'm grateful for the crisp taste and burst of energy I got on this trip.

As we begin to take the internet for granted, it’s more important than ever to recognize the need for robust and diverse technology criticism. We grapple with which metrics we should use to judge Facebook’s integrity in serving us, as a social platform or as a journalistic entity. Wealthy Silicon Valley VCs with a grudge can ruin entire publications by throwing their weight behind lawsuits. Publishers tiptoe around criticizing tech companies because social platforms and newsfeeds control access to their audiences. We need to stop seeing technology criticism as destructive; rather, it gives us the opportunity to shape the future of technology in our everyday lives. Heffernan’s nuanced example in Magic and Loss expands the notion of what technology criticism can and should be.

Read more at Columbia Journalism Review.

20. Cats
19. Millennials
18. Adventure
17. Fatherhood
16. Renminbi
15. Cloud computing
14. Orange (fruit)
13. Gratitude
12. Bag
11. Fluid dynamics
10. Edible mushroom
9. Laser
8. Company
7. Pressure
6. Cervical vertebrae
5. Self-esteem
4. Life
3. Water
2. Year
1. Human skin color

Sourced from Facebook Ad Preferences. This post is also published on Medium.

I could use your help! Given my interdisciplinary background, this list is by no means comprehensive or canon. And I’m drawing in a few less-than tradition sources like podcasts and literary fiction that are doing some important work that I think exemplifies a critical, balanced, and humanist approach to constructive technology criticism.

What are your favorite examples of technology criticism? What books or articles influence the way you think and write about technology? Any examples of tech writing that make you cringe? Where are my institutional and disciplinary blind spots? What are the pieces of technolgoy writing you keep going back to, the ones that made you go “huh,” the ones that got you so angry you tweetstormed about them? And if you’ve got a suggestion for a more dynamic tool for collaborative reading lists, send it my way!

Check out the list and comment here.

Listen to the episode on BBC Radio 4 or on iTunes.

I'm a huge fan of this podcast, and I highly recommend the rest of the Digital Human back catalog. Aleks Krotoski explores the psychological aspects of our relationship to technology.

One of the goals behind the series is to surface more examples of how data and algorithms impact our lives through personal stories. Gizmodo has a really active readership, so I'm eager to see what questions and stories arise from this inquisitive community.

Here's an excerpt from the first installment: 

I came across it the other day as a sponsored post in my Facebook news feed. It caught my attention, given how on point it was—It’s true, I am an American, just recently moved to Singapore. However, I’m not the type to wear my passport on my sleeve.

Still I wondered, what data and what advertising processes made it possible for this very-long-tail item to find its way to my eyeballs? 

How did this hyper-targeted ad reach me? And was it algorithmically generated content to begin with?

 Read more.

Check out the archives of the series, originally published at Al Jazeera America. Stay tuned, and don't hesitate to share your questions and curiosities with me for future installments!

mall and management office perfume
honeysuckle?
after the rain breeze
B.O.
bread talk
new carpet smell in Yale-NUS

Subscribe for more observations, stories, and insights.

Constructive Technology Criticism
Tow Fellow: Sara Watson

Contemporary technology criticism is a product of the internet, characterized by oversimplified binary questions, clickbait headlines, and sensationalizing explorations of moral panics and progress narratives. Technology criticism has the potential to play an operative role in shaping the design, adoption, and policies around emerging technologies. Sara’s work explores how Constructive Technology Criticism can improve the broader cultural discourse about technology, not only commenting on the technologies we have, but also influencing and shaping the technologies we want.

I'm grateful to the Knight Foundation for funding this work, which I've been thinking a lot about over the past year and I'm grateful to have the time and space to dive into it in greater depth this coming year. 

I'll be working virtually from Singapore and hanging out with the cohort in Slack, and in NYC when I can get there. And I'm also still affiliated, mostly virtually, with the Berkman Center this year. I'm planning on sharing a lot of the work in process, asking for feedback on reading lists and syllabi, building up style guides, etc. Stay tuned here and on the Tow Center blog for updates.

Here's the video on YouTube. Stay for the discussion with the audience in the second half (but just listen to the audio!). We ended up focusing on how it's not just data that we need metaphors for, but also the processes and systems that use and make sense of the data. We have just as much, if not more, trouble grasping the concept of algorithms and how they work.

Huge thanks to Tim Hwang for inviting me to come down to New York and to Data & Society for providing the space and minds for a great conversation. I'm hoping that this work will continue to shape the public discourse we're using to talk about data issues going forward, especially as those framings shape policy and law, and more importantly, the way we all think about our stakes in our data.

Fortunately, the FTC modernizes the definition of antitrust to address both vertical and horizontal monopolies across markets, thus breaking up Google into three hundred companies. Commercial personalization gets its Snowden moment when a BlueKai data broker whistleblower outlines the extent of the industry’s manipulative, exploitative, and discriminatory targeting practices. Internet of Things companies form a self-regulating body and sign a common Code of Conduct charter outlining what they will not do with customers’ data.

Read more from the rest of the DIS contributors.

I highly recommend the rest of the podcast (formerly known as New Tech City), and have been a big fan for a while. And Crystal is right, I appreciate open, casual conversations like this one with Manoush.

First I had the honor of sharing the stage at Berkman with Bruce Schneier, Joe Nye, Melissa Hathaway, and Yochai Benkler, moderated by Jonathan Zittrain. We discussed Bruce’s New York Times best-selling book, Data and Goliath. One thing that came out of the discussion was the idea that we need a data broker whistle blower, akin to Snowden, to reveal more about the practices of data brokers and expose the more egregious uses of our data.

Next, I was in DC talking about mobile health data—Our Data, Our Health—at the New America Foundation, apparently inspired by an article I wrote for Slate Future Tense a while ago. 

Friday in New York, I was invited to participate in an Algorithmic Transparency in the Media workshop at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The day focused on how algorithms are used in the newsroom—to generate articles, to recommend content to readers and enhance curation, and to advocate for change using predictive modeling to tell stories.

My favorite, and most out-of-the-ordinary event, was speaking at the New Museum at the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, using DIS's The Island (Ken) installation as my stage. I discussed my article about data metaphors, first published in DIS Magazine’s data issue.

@smwat just made a delicious vegetable stock @ The Island (KEN) and told us to 'take stock of the metaphors we use to describe data' #WhetTalks 👥💭👏 Sponsored by @redbullstudiosny

A photo posted by DIS (@dismagazine) on Mar 28, 2015 at 2:11pm PDT

And yeah, I also made stock while I was speaking at the fully-functional kitchen island. I'm not sure I completely understand my role in contemporary art...Someone attending read my piece and turned it into this awesome visualization of the argument:

Back in Cambridge Monday night, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on The Political Startup for the Harvard Ventures, a student-run group. We had a wonderful set of panelists all working to make government data more accessible and usable.

I was at a journalism conference recently where the topic of algorithmic curation came up. One of the speakers cited the comparison between Ferguson trending on Twitter while the Ice Bucket Challenge was all the rage on Facebook. It was held up as an example of how platforms influence and shape news and shape sharing behaviors of their users.

One student in the audience raised her hand, piping up that she contested the premise that Ferguson hadn’t trended on Facebook. “She was originally from St. Louis and all her friends from home had been talking about it, about race, about police violence, about protests. Ferguson was all over her Facebook newsfeed.”

The discrepancy provided an illustrative moment. One the one hand, opinion and data had made claims about how algorithmic filtering practices of platform affect access to news on Facebook. “On the other hand”, a personal experience of the same news event had differed drastically from the larger collective narrative about how news spreads online, and how politically sensitive topics are discussed within youth peer networks on Facebook.

That one student, away from home at school in Milwaukee, hadn’t felt distant from the activities in Ferguson. She was deep in it in her feed. The news was blowing up within her situated sphere of influence. This is how she experienced Ferguson.

Still, she had a hard time conceiving how Ferguson hadn’t made it into the feeds of others on Facebook. She contested the speaker’s claim with her own, situated and personal experience of the algorithmic curation.

Digital Literacy in Context

The greatest challenge we face in addressing the technical platforms that shape our information experiences is in demonstrating the effects between inputs and outputs in the system. Just as news literacy aims to develop skills to “understand a source’s agendas, motivations and backgrounds,” digital literacy needs to do the same of the platforms and their business models and motivations for providing value to consumers. We need tools that not only build diversity and solve for homophily problems, but also introduce us to the underlying editorial structures of these novel information platforms.

Digital news literacy ought to be taught by example and in context. Youth need to understand how algorithms affect their unique experience, not just how they influence everyone’s experience abstractly and in principle. We need more tools that allow youth to interact with the algorithm and see the micro effects of subtle changes from various inputs, like who you follow, what posts you comment on or re-share, and what things you like and click through.

Tools like Floodwatch’s ad tracking database allow us to compare our personal experience to that of others in a shared demographic profile. We could use still more technical interventions to help show variation in personalization.

What can youth learn about the way technical platforms work by comparing and contrasting the trending topics they see on Facebook and Twitter with peers in their network, and with others outside their network? What will they learn about what newsworthiness is in these personalized contexts?

If we take into account the personal, contextual experience of youth in teaching news literacy, we can help them to understand their place in a larger civic discourse around news and access to information by making it grounded, personal and real in the contexts where they get information today.

Ethnography in Youth and Media Research

News literacy goes beyond the sources that youth get information from, and how social media influences their filter bubble. It’s also about developing algorithmic literacy, for understanding the curatorial and editorial role of the platforms they interact with in their media environments.

Ethnographic interview work has vastly expanded our understanding of youth media practices by meeting them where they are and elevating their voices and concerns. Youth news experiences are inherently personalized now, and research methods for understanding those technical experiences must be as well.

Ethnography in Technology Journalism

Ethnographic approaches to knowledge and experience of algorithms should also expand to the media outlets covering our evolving relationship to technology. Journalists can play a role in developing digital literacy for access to information for their audiences by paying attention to and covering grounded, individual interactions with these systems.

That has been my methodological approach to “Living with Data,” the series I developed for Al Jazeera America. In it I examine encounters that illustrate our personal, situated experience of these tools, following reader submissions about our expectations about how these systems work or should work, and what is actually technically happening. The series aims to teach critical digital literacy through examples.

In part, this series was designed to refute the common argument that “I have nothing to hide” or that privacy concerns are too abstract for people to understand their effects. My aim is to illustrate through real experiences how autonomy and privacy are influenced by these sociotechnical systems that govern our access to information. A mission to develop critical digital literacies becomes especially important for a generation that takes Facebook and other social media platforms for granted.

This grounded approach makes the harms, or the surprises of data more personal, and more relatable. So while your experience may be very different from mine, I can begin to understand the inner workings of these algorithmic curatorial decisions because I can grasp the effects at a personal scale. I can compare my experience of Ferguson on Facebook against everyone else’s experience of the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Grounding coverage of these technical stories makes technical subjects more accessible, but also helps to make the individual stakes more present and clear. 

Though metaphors reveal truths by association, metaphors can just as easily obscure and misrepresent. Metaphors prime us to take for granted the ways we think about things. Most of the metaphors we use to talk about data in popular culture make sense to technocratic corporations and their leaders, those building and disseminating information technologies, but they are fundamentally dehumanizing. It is no wonder individuals continue to believe that they have “nothing to hide” in the face of big data, because we do not have the cognitive context to grasp how behemoth corporations use data. The dominant industrial metaphors for data do not privilege the position of the individual. Instead, they take power away from the person to which the data refers and give it to those who have the tools to analyze and interpret data. Data then becomes obscured, specialized, and distanced.

We need a new framing of a personal, embodied relationship to data. Embodied metaphors have the potential to bring big data back down to a human scale and ground data in lived experience, which in turn, will help to advance the public’s investment, interpretation, and understanding of our relationship to our data.

Read more at DIS Magazine: The Data Issue.

Here’s the first in the series:

Enchanting Chatrooms: on my days in the Wiccan chatrooms of AOL 

The Keys to the Internet: Maggie Koerth-Baker's account of an epic adventure into the depths of her local library to access the internet with her mom 

I’d love to share more of your stories. BBS, university connections, Prodigy at a friend’s house… Hit me up with a draft and I can invite you to publish in the collection!

• The Whale and the Reactor
• The Flamethrowers
• Seeing Like A State

A large portion of what I read in 2014 was Tech Book Club picks. I love having a group to read with, provides the obligation and constraint to make time for reading (more on the idea behind Tech Book Club). Working backwards...

We had the priviledge of author Molly Sauter joining us by Skype to discuss The Coming Swarm, her new book on DDOS actions, hacktivism, and political speech online. Sauter does a great job of outlining the ways speech and protest are different in public space online when it does not exist in the same ways it does in meatspace. Her considered research builds a much more subtle and nuanced narrative around political action online. It was a pleasure to read a dear friend's first book in print. Go Molly!

After what I think was my third try, I finally made it through The Information with TBC this time around. Final verdict: Gleick presents a well-researched compilation of everyone who has ever had something to say about information, but I still felt he relied too heavily on source material and sometimes these block quotes felt disjointed.

Part of the goal in Tech Book Club is to take a very liberal definition of what consitutes a book about technology, and we try to tackle concerns from all angles and disciplines. Realizing that many in our group hadn't heard of Seeing Like a State, we dove into this sociological take on power dynamics and instutional improvement schemes that quite literally miss the tress for the forest, that is local knowledge. Though Scott's field examples are dated, the technocratic critique is easily applied to present concerns about Google/Facebook/Amazon etc. and their problematic role as nonstate, technocratic actors. I'd say it should be required reading for anyone worried about power and scale of scientific and technological forces.

Little Brother intends to be young adult fiction, but it works for anyone with an interest in our technological society. Doctorow writes a special brand of near-future fiction and I'm inspired by how he gets people to care about current technological issues through stories.

I hadn't read any Margaret Atwood before Oryx and Crake, but I loved it. I loved the postapocalyptic unwinding, the inevitability of developing religious meaning to make sense of the world, the ambiguity in judging the actions of the characters in the fall out. 

Our summer of fiction started out with I, Robot, classic Asimov pulp science fiction. We talked a lot about the political job of I, Robot in the context of civil rights tensions and labor issues, as well as its more literal dealing with ethical concerns about robots. Others got hung up on style issues that didn't age well.

Flash Boys was an interesting deep dive into High Frequency Trading and the marginal infrastructure competition at play, but I was underwhelmed. Lewis weaves together stories uncovering the activity behind high frequency trading but it ends up reading like an impressionistic pastiche. To be fair, dark pools and algorithms are difficult black boxes to unpack. Lewis attempts to do so with lots of metaphors and aids, but I was left with the distinct fear that I didn't understand any better how HFT works than when I started.

Addiction by Design forever changed the way I think about gambling and casino design. I nearly walked into the casino in Singapore Marina Bay Sands just for the sake of research after reading Schüll's fantastic ethnographic and theoretical take on industrial design.

Many of us were very familair with danah boyd's work before reading, It's Complicated, and we were all impressed how accessible the structure brought parents and the wider media into a dialogue about subtlties in treating teens like human beings with agency, and not taking a technological deterministic view to oversimplifying the concerns about their safety and behaviors online.

A classic of virtual reality and corporatization of government, we talked through the ways Snow Crash holds up, or doesn't. And we were joined by super fan Ethan Zuckerman, who reads the book once a year.

Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom was an interesting ethnographic take on the F/OSS  development community addressing the political and ideological nature of their collective contributions and actions. 

I also read along with Diana's 24-Hour Book Club, in which we take a day to read, disperesed throughout the twittersphere and share our reactions over the hashtag—a distributed "flashmob" reading group. I love these marathons because they are both indulgent, giving me an excuse to spend all day reading, something I love but rarely allow myself to do, but they are also wonderfully communal, participating between breaks in chapters as I get a fresh cup of tea. Highly recommended. This summer, we read The Hotel Eden, a collection of beautiful short stories. I wasn't familiar with Ron Carlson before, but I really enjoyed the stories individually and as a set, and was thankful for the introduction.

#24hourbookclub also I want to go back and find the pivot sentence in each of these stories

— Sara M. Watson (@smwat) June 7, 2014

Another large portion of my reading list was for a wonderful class I audited in the spring led by Naomi Oreskes in the History of Science and Technology department at Harvard. The course covered transformative technologies, dealing with the storied social histories of development and adoption of large-scale infrastructure. Oreskes' brought her current interests in the hisitorical implications for current infrastructural climate change concerns, and I had a similar interests in the implications for consumer technologies and the cloud, big data, social media, and so on. This post is already getting too long so I won't go into too much detail for each, but the entire syllabus was fantastic and I enjoyed expanding my historical literacy of technology. 

• Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940
• Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930
• Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815
• Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
• Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (remains a favorite, and a huge influence on me)
• Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism
• Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West
• The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II 
• The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology 
• Railroaded: the Transcontinental and the Making of Modern America 
• On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970
• More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave

And on the topic of social histories of industrial automation, I got an advance copy of Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage for a book review, but I backed down from writing it. Carr continues to be a contrarian voice to counter the main trends in technology, yet critiques without offering up alternatives to the dominant trajectory he is reacts to, in this case, automation. He equates automation in consumer tools like Siri to the automation of piloting commercial airplanes, altogether unhelpfully broad definition. The book is too wideranging to be helpful, and ends with a  romanticized, idealized a view of technology as extensions of bodies (in the scythe sense of a tool that enhances work capabilities) rather than taking humans out of the work entirely. Carr makes genedered arguments about the emasculating effects of automation, without considering the female embodied perspective at all. He dabbles with historians who have worked on the narratives around technolgical progress, but does little with their insights. And that, I suppose, serves as my belated review.

I also read a few things for fun, generally while on vacation. 

Reading about The Blue of Distance in A Field Guide to Getting Lost while in front of the Pacific Ocean was trascendental—not at all surprising given Solnit's ability to weave ideas and times and places together in poetic and revelatory ways. She's one of the people I read to observe the craft of writing. And I will keep reading whatever she publishes.

Gone Girl was the perfect beach read, even for people who don't do beach reads. Well crafted.

I loved The Flamethrowers, largely because I loved revisiting my post-war art course in undergrad. I also enjoyed details about the medium specificity of film and cinema, as well as themes about womens' expressive abilities and limitations. 

The Goldfinch was epic, Dickensian, and lovely, also for all it's dealings in the worlds of New York and the art world. It was engrossing and sad, too. I also discovered that Donna Tartt is my androgynous style icon.

I finished out the year reading The Bone Clocks. A David Mitchell fan for a while, I was not dissappointed. It was full of wonderful voices and places, spanning decades of the past and the future. And the magical realism planted enticing details that unfolded as time played out. 

All accounted for, 2014 was a pretty great year in reading for me. I learned more about how to think historically,  enjoyed countless conversations about great books, I was inspired to dabble in speculative fiction to address the near future of technology, and I thoroughly enjoyed some new literary fiction to keep things fresh. Here's to more great reading in 2015, which starts off with Tech Book Club's January pick, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Join us!

My stupid refrigerator thinks I’m pregnant.

I reached for my favorite IPA, but the refrigerator wouldn’t let me take one from the biometrically authenticated alcohol bin. 

Our latest auto-delivery from peaPod included pickles, orange juice, and prenatal vitamins. We never have orange juice in the house before because I find it too acidic. What machine-learning magic produced this produce? 

And I noticed the other day that my water target had changed on my Vessyl, and I wasn’t sure why. I figured I must have just been particularly dehydrated. 

I guess I should have seen it coming. Our Fountain™ tracking toilet noticed when I got off hormonal birth control and got an IUD instead. But I thought our toilet data was only shared between Nest and our doctors? What tipped off our Samsung fridge? 

I got a Now notification that I was ovulating a few weeks ago. I didn’t even know it had been tracking my cycle, let alone by basal body temperature through my wearable iRing. I certainly hadn’t turned that feature on. We’re not even trying to have a baby right now. Or maybe my Aria scale picked up on some subtle change in my body fat? 

Or maybe it was ComWarner? All our appliances are hooked up through one @HomeHub. I didn’t think twice about it because it just worked—every time we upgraded the dishwasher, the thermostat. Could it be that the @HomeHub is sharing data between the toilet and our refrigerator? 

I went into our @HomeHub interface. It showed a bunch of usage graphs (we’ve been watching a “below average” amount of TV lately), but I couldn’t find anything that looked like a pregnancy notification. Where was this bogus conception data coming from? 

My iWatch pinged me. The lights in the room dimmed, and a connected aromatherapy candle lit up. The heart monitor on my bra alerted me that my heart rate and breathing was irregular, and that I should stop for some meditative breathing. I sat down on my posture-tracking floor pillow, and tried to sink in.

But I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering. Was it something in the water? Something in my Snap-Texts with Kathryn? If it was true, why hadn’t my doctor called yet? Could I actually be pregnant? 

I turned on the TVTab to distract me, but I was bombarded with sponsored ads for “What to Expect When You’re Expecting 9.0” and domain squatter sites that search for a unique baby name. 

I searched for similar incidents on the Quorums: “pregnancy Samsung refrigerator,” “pregnancy Fountain toilet.” Nothing. I really wanted to talk to someone, but I couldn’t call Google because they don’t have customer service for @HomeHub products. I tried ComWarner. After waiting for 37 minutes to speak with a representative, I was told that the he couldn’t give out any personal data correlations over the phone. What bureaucratic bullshit! 

It can’t be true. Russell has been away in Addis Ababa on business for the three weeks. And I’ve still got the IUD. We aren’t even trying yet. This would have to be a bio-correlative immaculate conception. 

I tapped Russell on his iWatch three times, our signal to call me when he is done with his meeting. I was freaking out. 

I could have really used that beer. But the fridge still wouldn’t let me take it. What if I am really pregnant? I opened up Taskr to see if could get an old fashioned birth control test delivered, but price was three times as expensive as it normally would be. I considered CVS, but I thought better of it since you can’t go in there anymore without a loyalty card. It was far, but I skipped the self-driving Uber shuttle and walked the extra mile to the place that accepts crypto, where I wouldn’t be tracked. I think. And that’s when I got the notification that my funding interview for my new project the following morning had been canceled. 

Read more in the Berkman Center’s Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World.

What would it take to map the Internet? Not just the links, connecting the web of sites to each other, or some map of the network of networks. That’s hard enough in itself. 

What if we were to map the flows of data around the Internet? Not just delivering packets, but what those packets contain, where they propagate, how they are passed on, and to what ends they are used. 

Between our browser history, cookies, social platforms, sensors, brokers, and beyond, there are myriad parties with economic interests in our data. How those parties interconnect and trade in our data is, for the most part, opaque to us. 

The data ecosystem mirrors the structure of the Internet. No single body has dominion or a totalizing view over the flows of information. That also means that no one body is accountable for quality or keeping track of data as it changes hands and contexts. 

Data-driven companies like Facebook, Google, Acxiom, and others are building out their proprietary walled gardens of data. They are doing everything they can to control for privacy and security while also keeping control over their greatest assets. Still, they aren’t held accountable for the ads individuals purchase and target on their platforms, or for tertiary uses of data once it leaves their kingdom. 

Complexity obscures causality. So many variables are fed into the algorithm and spit back out on a personalized, transient platform that no one can tell you exactly why you saw one post over another one in the feed or that retargeted ad over this one. We conjure up plausible explanations and grasp at folk theories that engineers offer up to explain their outputs. 

We have given data so much authority without any of the accountability we need to have confidence in its legitimacy to govern our lives. 

As everything, refrigerators and crockpots included, expand the Internet and the ecosystem of data that runs on top of it, everything will leave a data trail. Going forward we have to assume that what can be codified and digitized will become data. What matters is how that data will be used, now and in the future. 

The potential harms are hard to pin down, primarily because we won’t know when they are happening. We can’t investigate discrimination that replaces pre-digital prejudice markers like race and sex with proxies correlated from behavioral data. And we run into invisible walls based on statistical assumptions that anticipate our needs but get us wrong if we fall outside the curve. It’s nearly impossible to catch these slights and even harder to develop normative stances on grounds we cannot see. 

Before we can start to discuss normative judgments about the appropriate uses of data, we have to understand the extent of what is technically possible. We cannot hope to regulate the misuse of data without means to hold all interconnected parties accountable for the uses and flows of data.

We need to map these relationships and data patterns. Who are the parties involved? How are they collecting, cleansing, inferring and interpreting data? To what ends is the data being used? 

Linked Data is one technical solution to this problem. Standards make data flows both machine readable and human legible. Policies that travel as metadata are another approach to distributed accountability. We can also hold some of the largest brokers and users of data to higher standards of ethics. But markets of users won’t move against these systems until we have a better map of the ecosystem. 

Read more in the Berkman Center’s Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World.