In this little restaurant in Barra Grande, there was a TV playing music. On the screen, in the lower left corner, was written: “datatravel”. This really puzzled me. I assumed it was a typo, and that what it really meant was “data travel”. But again, what a weird combination of words to use, to express what I thought ought to be something like “reading disc”, or simply “playing music”.
And “data travel” has a slightly romantic tone attached to it. It’s saying “data are having a journey with their little feet—or whatever they happen to have as a mean for transportation—they can go anywhere, but they will end their journey at your place, because you kindly asked them to.”
In a digital world, data are zeros and ones. Are those zeros and ones actually traveling? Well, I guess it’s a useful metaphor to use. It’s more efficient to say: “Can you email me the photo?”, rather than say:“could you make your computer emit an electrical vibration that will map the photo in a binary format, so that my computer can interpret this signal back and build a duplicate of the original image? And, yes, we could do it using drums or smoke signals, but electricity is going to be faster, thanks ”
But still, as I was waiting for my “peixe frito”, the concept of data traveling bothered me. So back at the hostel, I googled “data travel”, to see if my command of English, or my knowledge of computational concepts where not failing me. And the third result was this interesting link, about a photography traveling to the moon.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/a16.data_trvl.html
Now, this is a very good example of what I would call: “the Data Dance”. The Data Dance is the coordinated moves that we, humans, do around the information, or data (in this case the family photography), and that the data do around us. The astronaut moves to the moon, holding a photography by the hand, drops it and duplicate it. Did he left the original on the moon?. Let’s say the original family portrait is still up there, and that a Chinese lunar mission find it, capture it and send a numeric copy back to the family. This would probably be the ultimate Data Dance, where data and human move together, separate one from each other, dance a little bit on their own, and them gets reunited; the photography orbiting the earth, while the family goes to Walmart.
Now, “data travel” could have an other meaning. It could mean that it is not the data that are traveling, but you. You are now entering a travel into the data! What a nice reminder from a TV interface “Remember: you are static in front of this static screen, but you are experiencing a data travel”
Traveling without moving. A bit like Xavier de Maistre, traveling in his room in Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794). Or Pessoa traveling in his Lisbon, and in himself:
“To travel? In order to travel it’s enough to be. […] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations? // Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are.”
(source:http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa , quoting “A Factless Autobiography”. Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 360 )
Well, I don’t really get what he means by, “Travels are travellers”. But what I now understood, was that “datatravel” meant that the USB key with the product name “datatravel” was connected to the TV.
Such a boring object, a TV is…