Data isn’t oil, so what is it?
Metadata
Highlights
- Their research showed that students shown the ‘virus’ metaphor were more likely to favour policy that looked at the root causes of crime, such as social deprivation, whilst students who read the ‘beast’ metaphor story favoured enforcement policies.
- All these metaphors imagine public data as a huge, passive, untapped resources - lakes of stuff that only has value when it is extracted and processed. But this framing completely removes the individual agency that created the stuff in the first place.
- The metaphor might work in an economic sense, but it fails to describe what data is as a material. It’s not oil, it’s people.
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We need metaphors for data that capture the agency and visceral emotions that our personal data can generate. Metaphors that link it directly into our lives and relationships, that help us recognise that this is us - we’re the ones being traded and sold and stored and analysed and processed.
- Maybe we should be very explicit, and refer to data as our lives. Imagine if a service had to ask you permission to ‘track your life’ or ‘share information about your life with other providers’. Already that feels grittier, more visceral, than just ‘data’.