When you fly into Changzhou’s airport, the recorded flight attendant over the intercom system tells you to open the shade on your window as the plane lands (normal landing protocol). Meanwhile, the real flight attendant walking down the aisle tells you to close the shade. The airport in Changzhou pulls double duty for a fleet of military aircraft, and landing descents potentially allow for observations of where and how those aircraft are laid out. While people usually cooperate with the human attendant, on a recent flight into the city from Kunming, the capital of a province that is plastered with military posters, when that real flight attendant repeatedly explained that the window shades needed to be closed because of the military equipment, the shades kept popping back up as passengers attempted to catch a glimpse of the aircraft they’d been exposed to in photos and videos.

People will people.

I think that’s been my takeaway from this first year at EFI. People are narrowly focused, self-interested, not great at predicting what other people will do, and utterly delightful for the chaos and richness they bring to situations. This past term, in particular, I’ve definitely had quite a dose of people from classes disrupted by industrial actions to my role as a student rep that most certainly did not lead down expected paths.

But stepping out of this for a bit feels like it’s left me more muddled than anything else. This term’s classes gave me tools to play with, but sometimes felt like only half the instructions were provided.

Inclusive Society – Gave me a lot to chew on and a great opportunity to run through an actual project that felt like it could be a precursor for the final project. I felt like the journey through that was important for understanding the general procedure for how to take on a project, but it also made me nervous about tackling something less traditional. I suppose that’s a useful discovery for helping me narrow my scope, but it was also a little disappointing to let go of larger dreams.

Ethical Data Futures – I appreciated the case studies and topics that we covered are still coming up, but as the in-person component almost didn’t exist thanks to the industrial action, I guess I learned from this class that people are important and relying heavily on technology can be extremely limiting.

Data Science for Society – Taught me that more structure keeps me from sacrificing myself in really painful ways (and may actually be the catalyst for what led to my looking for more structure in my life the past couple of months — started looking into more regular jobs). I also picked up that data collection is a dangerous business because it hides a lot of sins while making it look like it reveals others.

Representing Data – Showed me that group projects can actually be a joy when everyone proactively steps up and communicates what they’re trying to do whether or not they feel they’re succeeding.

Acting as a Rep – Taught me that we make decisions pretty blindly whether or not we think the data is there (and the data usually isn’t there at least not to the extent that would be useful for making a decision).

My biggest takeaway from this year has been more of

a question than a certainty. We’re outsourcing an awful lot to technology and simplifying the world into data on a massive scale; how is this going to change us? What is this datafied world going to look like? What are datafied humans going to act and speak like?

I guess this is what I’m struggling with at the moment. How do I turn this curiosity into an investigation of a specific group of people wrestling with a specific problem?