Gabe Weintraub and I are teaming up for our Product Autopsy class to explore the supply chain mapping, carbon accounting, cost accounting, social impact analysis of on-demand video and the growth and efficiences of massive data centers.
Our initial research framework (super rough, hardly a framework yet really). This is basically one day's worth of googling on data centers, video streaming, ISPs, and Netflix. Netflix googling led to a super helpful email exchange which gave me a lot of the information I needed about Netflix's energy efficiencies.
I am excited to meet the challenge of telling a cohesive, compelling story about data in concrete, physical terms as it dovetails with my interests in systems, automation, Big Data, humanity's obsession with archives and record-keeping, energy apportionment in the time of capitalism and its antecedents, and notions of information as intangible and tangible. The latter somehow echoes my fascination with particle-wave duality and it would be nice to ferret out this connection - if not in this immediate project, for my science-fiction world-building schema.
This also is a nice complement to my Stratosphere of Surveillance class research/storytelling path (re Big Data). Also relevant to my work in Testing Tomorrows (Big Data) and Future Interfaces (Big Data). Nice!