In my first post on medium, I asked a question about what will we do when facing the big data, information overloaded and privacy. Over the past three months, we learned about almost everything about technology and information: how data centers were designed and hidden from our everyday life while playing the most crucial role in our information landscape, how artificial intelligence and robotics change the way we interact with the world and even our jobs perspectives and how does power plays into ethics and data privacy.
At the beginning of the semester, I want to have a mindset where I will learn things across different areas of knowledge and discovery connection between them. For me, data and information are closely related while having distinct meanings: Data are the metadata data of information, it was the heart and bone of the information. Information is the brain of data, it is how you process and interpret the data. I have been thinking a lot about how information plays into our everyday life, it can be you Facebook post, it can be used in mass communication; it can make technology smart, the space intelligent; it changed how we interact with physical space, and even how that change the digital landscape of a virtual space. I appreciate the fact that the class materials nicely blended into my HCI course and Internet of Things lab activity over the semester — I was able to think about the perspectives of technology development, user experience as well as the eco-system and social impact around technology.
My favorite part of the class is having the flexibility to research on things that I am passionate with: we made design fiction and stories on Anonymous and NSA, I wrote about YouTube Culture and their impact for the internet movement for my final paper, I also made Glitch Art by messing with the source code, and seeing connection between my work and social network analysis… These make me think back about the questions that I asked at the beginning of semester — the argument and anxiety about Artificial Intelligence, and the balance between benefits and trade-offs from big data. In many ways, information landscape and data culture are not just things that happen on the internet or computer world, it is also closely related to our physical world, our everyday interaction with technology and people. Although I have some prior knowledge with some of the topics we discussed over the semester, but after this class, it makes me think critically about each side of a story, and appreciate the perspective from both sides of the debate.
