During a recent conversation with two colleagues I was lamenting the lack of continuity in our writing center's data. Exciting, right? Okay, it's not necessarily exciting, but it's certainly interesting. It turns out that this whole data thing is pretty messy, and, most surprising to me, it turns out that that's okay.

I think my conscious experience of 'big data' probably started when school administrators decided to put RFID chips in our school IDs and to require us to wear them in a visible spot on our shirts all day, every day. It seems like a bad idea - I don't know what data they would gather from tracking our movements around the school since we had a class schedule we were suppose to follow anyway - but someone in administration probably said the magic words 'assessment' and 'data,' and we got chipped. That was in junior high. Since then the push for data and the concomitant rise of 'big data' as a concept and a buzzword has been approaching critical cultural mass. As bigdata has become more ubiquitous we've gotten more and more used to being seen as data, as content; when someone steals our data to use as their own we say that they've 'stolen our identity,' as if we are reducible to the quantifiable aspects of our lives. More than this, our informational identity is a kind of online currency now: we constantly give away our information as the price of admission to 'free' social media applications, email service providers, and online sales aggregators. But is that actually good?