Have We Truly Democratized Data?

Dora has a friend and former classmate who worked at Lehman Brothers in 2008.

I was working at a business school at the time, but even in that environment, I had never paid much attention to economic news. If it hadn't been for that friend of Dora's, that personal connection to the first facade to crumble, I likely would have continued to pay very little attention to economic news, even at the beginning of the largest economic crisis of my lifetime.

But I had a personal connection, and I was keeping a blog back then. So I wrote a little something about the fall of Lehman Brothers.

The effort plugged me into the story. I sought out resources that would help me understand what I was living through, and I found Planet Money. Planet Money was a podcast published three times a week (now they publish twice weekly). The producers come from the NPR News team and the This American Life team. In the early days of the economic crisis, they worked to produce economic news stories that the average listener could understand - more than that, they strove to make those stories engaging (they still do).

It worked on me. I didn't miss an episode, and I got what felt like a peek behind the curtain of the world of economics. I came to have a fairly strong grasp on how complex quantitative tools of analysis, tools only understood by a few, made the mortgage market appear safer than it was for several years. The savviest of investors recognized the risk a little before the general public, but even those investors had spent years pouring capital into mortgage securities constructed by "quants" using algorithms the investors themselves didn't understand.

And we are still dealing with the aftermath.

The role quants played in the economic crisis has many parallels to the role of the people doing the tagging of data on the internet. The people who use HTML to code the massive amount of information posted online everyday have a grasp on the data that few information consumers can understand. The people who tag the data know where the data come from, how its connected to other sources, and how its distributed. Meanwhile, the people who use that data to make important decisions in their lives would not know how to get at the information's information.

In economic terms, that represents information asymmetry, and it rarely ends well. 

In my literacy and technology class, I've referred to an argument I've made here about the change in information literacy practices I've witnessed as a writing instructor working during the rise of Web 2.0:
Students no longer have to learn how to find information, they have to learn how to sift and winnow information.

That task would be much easier if my students had stronger functional literacy skills, the subject we aim to discuss today in class. If my students knew how technology delivers data, then the task of tracing information back to a source would be made easier.Their literacies would be made richer.

Stray observations:

• This experience of thinking about literacy through the lens of technology has led to repeated associations with my enjoyment of science fiction. Early in the quarter I was thinking of Snow Crash and Neuromancer, books that describe the role of information literacy in a not too distant future. This week had me thinking about the back story of the Dune novels, set in a far off future, centuries after a religious war has destroyed and forbidden all machines that reproduce the thoughts of a human - the war was motivated by those who thought such machines took knowledge out of the hands of people.
• The fact that my own dabbling in digital literacy with this very blog is what led to my engagement with economics is a nice little added bonus.