This follows on my part 1, About Data. Basically, this is my own take on the issues David Weinberger brings up in his Metadata and Desire.

At least for many practical reasons, people desire a common language of measures through which they can express to each other and themselves what they see as commonly observed, or "objective", facts. In measuring, people create data—individual measurements, or facts.

I was born on December 2. This is a fact and a measurement of my own life as well as in relation to the lives of others. But, its definition—its fact-ness, rests on a human defined system of measure, in this case, a particular date system.

This date system, while it has some relationship to regular occurences in the physical world, is itself an abstraction created by people out of desire for a common language (and a way to understand and communicate patterns of physical nature).

The power of data, or measurement, in our lives suggests the power of understanding, both in terms of a commonly, or objectively, shared view of the world, and also in terms of knowledge to shape that world. The more we measure, we seem to suppose, the more we understand.

But, data is like lossy compression of experience—it is experience reduced to symbols of that experience, and the symbols can not be decompressed back into complete experience itself. Each datum is one proverbial blind man's description of an elephant—and it is his description, not his experience.

So, in our desire to know the elephant (both in terms of having a common, objective, knowledge, and in terms of having some idea of how to fathom it), we keep sending in more blind men and women, keep recording their descriptions, and seem to keep supposing a complete picture will someday emerge!

This isn't without merit—there are eminently practical results that come out of this, like don't stick your hand there and food goes in here. And, it is both innate curiosity and of practical usefulness to keep charting the beast.

There is, however, an idealism that, given enough charts and tables and maps of data, cross-referenced and reconciled to some common set of symbols, a true, practically lossless (or close enough) representation of our world will be encoded, and we thereby will be able navigate it without the blinding noise of unreconcilably different human points of view.

Through our data, we recognize patterns in the world, and those patterns help us navigate through the world. In our data, we also recognize patterns, and we also look to define those patterns to further help us navigate.

The utility of all these patterns however inspires conflicting options: we can try to shape our world to match the patterns we recognize, or be creative where a pattern doesn't exactly match the world. And, of course, when computers are involved, creativity is a lot less an option for a computer.

With something like calendar dates, we organize our lives and world around our date system so that its pattern has more utility. We define a pattern of seven day weeks, and we shape our lives around seven day weeks. Even computer calendars can account for weekly schedules.

But, the more elaborate and personal a pattern is, for example, a pattern that maybe is supposed to match up singles on romantic dates, often the less we are able to conform ourselves to the pattern. For example, a pattern (e.g., a computer dating match maker) may predict that two people will fall in love, but, if in actuality they don't, they probably won't change their lives just to be in agreement with the pattern.

The issue of data in our time appears in the circumstance where, especially through the Internet, we are given many opportunities to systematically codify patterns. We can not only choose to agree on date systems worldwide, but we can choose to agree on systems that classify personality, human relationships, likes and dislikes, etc. And, those choices can be coded into the systems we use for all kinds of things.

Our desire to navigate the world keeps us attracted to patterns that help us navigate. But, we are being given opportunities to define patterns usable by computers that may ask of us that we change our lives and world to derive (more) utility of the pattern.

The issue is in deciding in what circumstances we will do this, and in whether this will be decided for us by others without our consent.

Ultimately, our desire for navigation is towards the circumstance of creativity—when we aren't getting squashed by the elephant, we creatively enjoy the possibilities in her. But, we can also over navigate (ourselves, or be forced into it) and destroy the creative possibilities. And, at this time, we now can do so on a global and pervasively systematic scale.