Blog Post 11

I have always been curious about "Big Data"; since I've been in the DTC program, every single class I've taken has dealt with a few of the same issues.  Copyright, fair use, data mining and social media have all been a part of my college education.  It wasn't until now that I started to think about how data analysis would come off if it were applied back to the real world.  Since the digital age is such a recent era in the span of human societies, some of our functions, terms and procedures have crossed into the digital world (saving, file folders, trash, desktop).  We are now becoming more and more aware of the cross back into the real world.  Some of the data that is collected from the internet may include how often users access a site, how many times users click on a certain link and how long a user stays on a single page.  This type of data mining is obviously quite similar to the type of data mining that happens in the real world.  A retail store can track how many customers enter their store, record how long they stay and calculate which items are the most popular. Data mining becomes questionable when simple numbers are replaced with personal statements, opinions, photos and videos of individuals.  One would argue that the internet should be considered a massive public forum when anything and everything that is communicated is fair game to not only view but also analyze.  But if Copyright law applies to all creative works until it is specified for some type of creative license then how does social media fit into that?  Can Copyright be applied to blogs?  Let's look at it from the other end.  Is it legal to collect song lyrics of popular artists and analyze their contents if those lyrics are protected by copyright law?  They are very difficult questions to answer and I am certainly not qualified to do so.  I will however quote my mother to end this post.  She told me this when I started using AOL Instant Messenger back in 7th grade: "The internet is not written in pencil but in permanent ink, it can never be erased.  Be careful what you type and always mean it."  Since then I have always lived by those words when it comes to my interaction on internet and so I can honestly say that if someone were to use my information for analysis, I don't think I would mind.