Dynamic Data

In 1996 I was 13 years old and doing my best to create a compilation tape on my Sony stereo (okay, it was a boombox, but c'mon, let my 13 year old self have that one) by keeping one ear trained to the radio and leaping over chairs and anything else I'd strewn across my floor to slam down the record button whenever I heard the first few notes of a song I wanted to be able to listen to again at my leisure.  This resulted in literally dozens of mix tapes with the beginnings of songs clipped or being spoken over.  Actually, about fifty percent of the time I found myself jamming to the tune and not realizing till the second chorus that I'd completely forgotten to hit record.  I was literally and figuratively struggling to consume the content that I desperately wanted to consume.  I wanted to listen to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones play Impression That I Get until my ears bled, but I couldn't get the damn thing off the radio without Ryan Seacrest bleating all over the first eight bars!  Yes, I could have gone out and bought the album, but that was a lot of money for 13 year old me to be spending on a song that they were just going to play again in thirty minutes anyway.

Fast forward an additional 13 years and the problem has reversed itself entirely.  Rather than struggling to get at the content we want through questionably legal means, I struggle with the sheer volume of content--musical and otherwise--being thrust at me everyday while simultaneously attempting to prevent myself from being abused through questionably legal means.  The tables, as they say, have been turned.  Instead of spending hours after school waiting to pounce on that ONE song, I now have the world waiting to pounce on me and their content is ubiquitous.    Google is tracking me.  Facebook is tracking me.  Twitter, Digg, Amazon, and Apple are tracking me.  At least four grocery stores are tracking me.  I think even Pets.com is tracking me, and I don't have a pet.  Yet.  They are tracking me because I am now a commodity--a dynamic data point in the largest marketing research project the world has ever seen.  And the idea is to keep me happily running in their hamster wheel so that their marketing research analysts can study me, while their competitors eat woodchips.  Which is why the major players are beginning to step all over each other to create the most complete hamster cage with the least squeaky wheel.  Apple creates the iPhone so Google develops Android.  Google dominates in advertising so Apple creates iAds and essentially kicks Google ads off the iPhone.  Google will almost certainly release an iTunes competitor just as they released Buzz to compete with Twitter.  They are also rumored to be bringing a Facebook competitor online.  Meanwhile Apple is clearly seeking to take on Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo in the social gaming space with the iPhone and iPod touch.  

 This is the start of the competition to see who gets to be the first to start microchipping us at birth.  From here on out the goal is not to convince you to buy a product, the goal is convince you to buy a network on which to live your life--so they can more easily sell you products.  Hopefully one of the byproducts of this competition will be robust social networks and staggering advances in commercial technologies.  In the meantime, however, it will be important not to get too cozy with any one of these networks.  I know more than a few people who seem to have their whole lives on Facebook, but no idea how they would extricate themselves from it.  And sure, Facebook is doing really well now--apparently they can afford to just give you stuff to keep you coming back--but who knows what five or even ten years will bring?  Do you want to be 32 and realize that every conversation you had with friends and every picture you ever took in college disappeared just because congress threw Mark Zuckerburg in jail?   The protocols that will define these networks are young at best and non-existent in most cases. 

I put a lot of music--A LOT OF MUSIC--on cassette tapes (which weren't cheap) and spent a boat-load of my time (which was cheap) doing it, and I have not a thing to show for it today.  Not a single bit or byte of that data made it's way past the technological bloodbaths of the Compact Disc and the MP3 player.   And today our lives are loaded onto and revolving around technologies that could disappear in the time it takes Steve Jobs to say "…and one more thing."  The lesson of all those mixtapes lost to time is that if the data we generate and accumulate is ever going to be useful to us it has to be coddled along and kept in a dynamic state.  Otherwise, when you have an unreasonable desire to hear LaBouche's "Sweet Dreams" you'll have to go to iTunes and buy it.  And that's just embarrassing.