Malleability of Data

In two weeks of Data Culture, we’ve wrestled with the meaning of “data,” debating whether data are merely fodder for larger arguments or potent enough to make a definitive argument on their own. David Lyon, in his 1994 book The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society, posits that electronic data are too malleable to simply be taken at face value.

Lyon employs the term “dataveillance” to describe the modern methods of surveillance, which take the form of big data and supercomputers, rendering the Big Brother-style video surveillance of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four unnecessary in the modern world. With extensive information on file about the demographics, histories, and consumer preferences of a population, governments and corporations both appear to have the details of the populace at their fingertips—a frightening thought, for sure. But Lyon counters that data’s malleability makes “confidence in the reliability of the record somewhat naïve” (59). For one, data stored by computers can easily be erased without being conspicuous in their absence. As a result, the “electronic trail” of data doesn’t necessarily tell its entire story. With audio and video surveillance, however, broken links are impossible to ignore—consider the missing eighteen minutes of the Watergate tapes. Additionally, Lyon brings up the issue of identity theft; I may not be able to impersonate my grandmother well enough to fool surveillance video, but I could certainly impersonate her while shopping online if given the right data.

The lesson, it seems, is that data can’t be fully trusted: not seeing means not (necessarily) believing. Therefore, it follows that “dataveillance” fails to embody Bentham’s original Panopticon structure, since the central authority has an unclear view of what its “inmates” (i.e. citizens or clientele) are truly up to. Those who fear that big data has ushered Big Brother into our daily lives ought to relax, because numbers only tell part of the story.

Lyon, David. “From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon.” The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994. 57-79. Print.