This line of questioning poses yet another series of questions about who or what reads our life data. Are there secrets in the land of pure data? Who keeps them? Are they hidden in the program code, so as to appear like innocuous anomalies, as hackers do to hide their portals to a user's information? Is there an inherent privacy to data, or can data only achieve vitality through the event of being read? What does reader response mean in a purely virutal existence? Would the virtual person appear to contradict the 'reader's' perception of them. In other words, do virtual beings exist by constantly renewing and authoring their scripts, as the most sophisticated net bots are known to do? Surely, an expert systems model of such complexity would require systems of self-regulation and feedback capable of both controlling the homogeneity of, and relations between their component data-parts, and adapting to changing conditions (software/hardware/wetware/malware/and so on) of their virtual environments. To meet the criterion of autopoesis, that condition of living entities proposed by Maturana and Varela (1980), there would need to be a coherency, as well as accident-toward-reconfiguration possible within the interoperativity of data-writers and readers. A researcher would have to know something not only of the processes and selective functions of data authoring, but also of data transmission, interpretation, interpolation, and the host of contextual information that would be encoded along with it, enabling the exchange. Would these last, additional features not function similarly to the background features that influence social interactions, such as personal habits, dress, smell, mental and physical state of individuals in the moment (hunger causing inattention, stress causing emotive reactions, and so on)? Such contextual features are largely overlooked in social research on literate transactions, but would these contextual features not become just as determining if a sudden code-blockage were to influence the health of the person and their social interactions in virtual space?

The process of recording phenomena always represents a point of view/placement within events, it also includes a exclusion from its frame of other postions and perspectives. This positioning, so clearly tied to orientation and perspective, are ingredients of embodied power relations having become mediated as the emotion content of form and style, and are the conversion of organic hegemonies among our datafields. We are left with foreground and background data within an exclusive frame or array. Doubtless this exclusivity is merely a composite overlayed among other frames, just as when several programs are open on a computer's screen at the same time, and the computer sits among books and papers, and somewhere a TV is on, playing music. Datafields are complex, governed not only by arrays, branching trees in which information is distributed in its codified form, but also by the relations underlying visible, sonic, textual and programmatic features. Meaning is not only constructed, it is distributed among such subtle distinctions of content as only a competent attentional practice can endure. A competent attentional practice in this sense could only be described in oblique terms, as the ability to unarticulate unnecessary or undesireable components within the complex array of data.

This is, after all, the bot's greatest accomplishment. It's no surprise that Google, along with other automated search and sharing functions, should be dominant institutions in the current marketplace. More than ever, we cannot do without automated services that, to quote John Willinsky in 1999, "gain competitive advantage by turning data into knowledge" (p. 112). He continues with a more particular view point on knowledge discovery in databases, to point out that "recycling data-waste into knowledge-profit does pose a danger," a danger of "data dredging". He exemplifies this by hunting for statistical significance in his own dissertation research data, which he finally accepts may only contain statistical coincidence. And yet this is certainly reflective of learning, and how we come to distinguish between coincidence and significance is aligned with knowledge. But what if we are faced with information that bears no clear relevance, and do not have a statistical measuring stick to run our automated functions and algorithms upon? It is a tip of the hat to Willinsky as a friend and occassional band member that his influence came to me in this round about fashion. For I had to ask, why not recycle data-waste? Can we create a sustainable informational commons without it? Is this not now the popular mode of navigation and engagment with the ocean of information. Is it only knowledge that should be resourced, and turned to social, and cultural, and even economic, knowledge-profit? My work owes him a debt, in so far as we share common interests, but have very different approaches. His, toward access to knowledge, mine toward excess of information. Next page