[-empyre-] is data ever neutral?

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@unsw.edu.au>]

brett wrote:
> previous post. I'm a technological realist. I most often fall on the side
> of technology being neutral, and prefer to hold people responsible for how
> technology is used or abused.  I don't feel, at least very acutely, the
> (supposed) taint that some feel adheres to technology just because it was
> developed by the military. I am not convinced that the armed vision that
> Crandall correctly identifies is necessarily self-fulfilling because of
> its origins. The internet, electronic computation, database, GPS, maps all
> of these have civilian uses that are important and good making. Alan
> Turing may have been the single person most responsible for the allied
> victory in WWII, an accomplishment that I certainly celebrate. Our
> asses were saved from the Nazi's by a gay genius. History is rarely
> more beautiful than that.

yet turing unfortunately didnt survive the persecution of the moral majority

im reminded of when afganistan was bombed , a section the VRML world used
landscape data sets to make terrain maps of the country to portray war like
activities..
some where very nasty ..one had the sound ofshooting and people (presumeably
afgahnis) dying when you clicked on it.. others had more analysis like john
kilmas  now very well known  "great game" work
http://www.cityarts.com/greatgame/

i dont believe that data can ever be  neutral..  certainly it can be
manipulated and molded to fit a perspective, however code is a life from..
and like that oterh new life form  of technoloy it is never neutral.. donna
harraway got it wrong when she said the cyborg was promiscous and unfaithful
to its origins.. it isnt.. technology referes  its origins subtly yet
consistantly.  we use the tools of the military every day and they have
traces, a recessive geneaology of militarism if you like.. so they can
easily revert to form.. be reactivated. our technologies  are sleepers ..
exciting , attractive and dangerous..

data is gathered in certain ways, for certain intents, by certain gatherers,
the software is never neutral..it has an inherent signature and bias of the
person who wrote  it.. key strokes input into a key board are never neutral
they have a rhythm of the user..   we are never objective , never have an
uncompromised overview.. yet data tries to trick us to  think we do.

also thanx for bringing up  jordan crandals essay again.. "Anything that
Moves: Armed Vision". (http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=115) just a
quick quote..
"Database society is driven by the threat of danger, a danger that
militarized perspectives both counter and help to create. It relies on a
sporadic state of emergency, a virtual panic sphere, around which the public
rallies. Protective measures are installed in order to insure the public's
safety - safety from bodily harm and from the possibility of its
transmissions being assaulted (doctored, stolen, lost, rerouted). Under the
possibility of danger, database and corporeality blend in a hybrid body - a
statistical person - requiring new protections. "

id add to that in our viral information era . the threat of and
transmissions of infection and contagion and mutation.... from small pox to
HIV and HCV and chemical weapons, and depeletd uraniaum bombs..
We now need proctection from the SARS virus in asia..it was declared
quaratineable today by WHO.. every day we are given the death and infection
statistsics. to make sense of the world we recalculate our chances of
catching and surviving it..

melinda