Shutterstock/ patrice6000. All rights reserved.Deluged in data for more than a decade, our reflex has been to articulate our fears and anxieties in the language of privacy.
But it may be more appropriate – and useful – to think in terms of conscience. Etymologically, conscience is, of course, the “knowledge with” which we act, on which we are judged, and through which we achieve self-awareness. Today, this knowledge is produced in part through the steady streams of information we cede, emit and receive in the ceaseless data-flux that we now inhabit.
We might call this new reality “life in the datasphere”, extending the old ideal of a “public sphere” to capture how data immersion has become the fundamental condition of our lives as workers, public citizens and private persons.
