When you start a university physics course, the first subject you learn is classical mechanics. Mechanics comes in two flavours: statics, matter at rest, and dynamics, matter in motion.

One of the Internet’s preoccupations recently — at least in the parts I frequent, which admittedly probably aren’t that representative — has been the physics, if you like, of data. There’s a lot of writing out there, much of it (like this piece from Tom Armitage) excellent, about treating data as a material; understanding it as a physical thing with seams, grains, symmetry and cleavage planes. This is true, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s incomplete. Data’s not solely a static thing. It bounces, usually somewhere behind your eyeballs.

I don’t want to get unnecessarily tree-in-the-forest about this, but if no-one sees a piece of data, it doesn’t exist. Data only exists inasmuch as it supports either communication or decision-making. When it’s not being looked at, whether by a person or a process, it’s as if it had never been at all. So if it’s a material, it’s a profoundly weird one. It’s not even as material as fields are; anything with mass bends space-time. Unobserved data is truly weightless.

So right now, I prefer not to think of data as, primarily, a material. In fact, I prefer not to think of data as having any independent existence at all. Instead, I think about processes. How do people make decisions? How do they communicate and support their viewpoints? These processes are supported by technology, but they’re rooted in psychology and economics. When you view data mining this way, it looks a lot less like physical mining and a lot more like the newer, nerdier brother of user-experience design. User experience design is, loosely speaking, applying the lessons of graphic design to the design of intellectual processes. Data science is, loosely speaking, the application of mathematical and information-theoretic ideas to the design of intellectual processes. They’re both part of a wider field; that of service design.

Half the battle’s already won; people, like me, with science backgrounds are reading the design literature and trying to follow along. We’re waiting in the middle. When recently-graduated designers start talking about dimensionality reduction, though: well, then we’ll really be moving.

Some really sharp observations here about how Google just revalued another information market - this time, turn-by-turn navigation.

Google are so confident that they’re the Internet Inland Revenue that they’re even offering rebates…

The other day I realised that I still really don’t know London.

Dan and I had to get from Oxford Circus to Clerkenwell the other day. I’d been up there once before, so I was pretty sure how to get there. Farringdon tube, right? Either two changes or two stops north on the Bakerloo line and then along the Circle. Either way, it’d take forever. It was raining, too. And I’d managed to put a hole in my shoes.

Not so fast, says Dan; better to go along the Central Line to Chancery Lane. I thought he was mental, until we checked the maps on our phones.

I had no idea that Chancery Lane was that close to where we were going! I thought it was miles away. After all:

I’m not a Londoner, just a day-tripper, and my internal London is in the shape of the Tube map. The thing is, I know the Tube map’s about topology, not geography. I’ve seen Tom Carden’s stuff on Tube travel times. Still, I just knew Chancery Lane was nowhere near Farringdon, damn it.

In all the writing there’s been on networked urbanism recently, which is terrific and you should read it all, there’s been one thing which has been bothering me by its absence. We’re going to stick sensors in everything and garland cities with wireless, and then we’re going to shove all that data onto the Internet. (In case you wondered, that’s where we come in.)

But once we’ve got all that data, well: networked urbanism means, amongst other things, building visualizations of everything. Abstracted representations of partial recordings of the recent past. And, like the Tube map, if they’re any good than they’re going become part of us.

We’re pushing abstractions of abstractions of abstractions into peoples’ heads.

And, well, here’s what I’ve been worrying about: have we got a moral responsibility here? There’s no Hippocratic oath for informaticists — “First, do no memetic harm”. But if we’re building these cerebral prostheses for ourselves and for each other, then don’t we have a duty of care not to mess with how people perceive the city too badly? And how do we avoid doing that?

Or maybe it’s just me.