Todd Gitlin: Everything Is Data, but Data Isn’t Everything
[Todd Gitlin’s latest book (with Liel Leibovitz), The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election has just been published by Simon & Schuster.]
This bumper-sticker headline, borrowed from the sociologist Pauline Bart, speaks beautifully to the latest Wikileaks outpour and the question of what it does and doesn’t mean.
The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The database is not just a metaphor, in fact—it’s a certification of what knowledge looks like and how it is to be gained. A metaphor is a carrier, a condensation of meaning. A database is a heap.
I don’t see a convincing way to feel anything other than agnostic about the impact of Wikileaks—specifically about how much damage the latest data dump will do. Choose your expert opinion. Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski are unfazed. Hillary Clinton is sternly censorious. Joe Lieberman is—Joe Lieberman. Speculation is cheap—so cheap that everyone and her uncle can afford it.
If the database is the shape of knowledge in our time, then the definitive act of mediated communication is the data dump. So it is not surprising that the generation that has made the mash-up its prime aesthetic form has produced the data dump. But to put it this way is not to congratulate Wikileaks—at least not without considerable ambivalence. It’s to lament the coming of a certain—shall we say generational?—style of exposé. Wikileaks is the Facebook of whistle blowing.
Will the Wikileaks of this week make it harder for diplomats to conduct the back-channel talk they need to conduct?..
Read entire article at New Republic
This bumper-sticker headline, borrowed from the sociologist Pauline Bart, speaks beautifully to the latest Wikileaks outpour and the question of what it does and doesn’t mean.
The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The database is not just a metaphor, in fact—it’s a certification of what knowledge looks like and how it is to be gained. A metaphor is a carrier, a condensation of meaning. A database is a heap.
I don’t see a convincing way to feel anything other than agnostic about the impact of Wikileaks—specifically about how much damage the latest data dump will do. Choose your expert opinion. Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski are unfazed. Hillary Clinton is sternly censorious. Joe Lieberman is—Joe Lieberman. Speculation is cheap—so cheap that everyone and her uncle can afford it.
If the database is the shape of knowledge in our time, then the definitive act of mediated communication is the data dump. So it is not surprising that the generation that has made the mash-up its prime aesthetic form has produced the data dump. But to put it this way is not to congratulate Wikileaks—at least not without considerable ambivalence. It’s to lament the coming of a certain—shall we say generational?—style of exposé. Wikileaks is the Facebook of whistle blowing.
Will the Wikileaks of this week make it harder for diplomats to conduct the back-channel talk they need to conduct?..