The main thing I learned in religious studies 315 that data is much more malleable than one would like to believe. Someone who uses data has to be very careful with their metadata otherwise they can end up painting a maligning portrait of someone. For instance, if you showed crime statistics for an area you could say that one group could be more prone to violence than others, showing a false and harmful narrative. Even if the data is collected from an area that is wrongfully overpoliced. This would then create a false narrative and if used in a predictive algorithm, would persecute people wrongly.
Another thing I learned, is that the metadata used and on a macro level, the metadata given to users shows a company’s inherent bias, this in conjunction with my other class, display that it is very hard for an individual and by extension, systems created by individuals to be without presuppositions and biases. These then reflect in meta data where it is very hard to convey a different way of knowing as opposed to the traditional euro-American post renaissance way of thinking. For example, there exists whole other database offering tailored to indigenous people groups. Utilizing a similar but more niche set of metadata.
The final few sessions were focused on privacy, and I left those classes with a much more revitalized fear of big data. The main concern I walked away with is predictive data algorithms and virtual reality, I will be moving to the woods.