What is personal data in an age when data is everything but personal? Websites, apps, social media and ‘smart’ devices all thrive on the same thing — data. Not just any data, but our data.
The Glass Room Community Edition is a pop-up exhibition that explores how society is dealing with the growing dependency on data and technology, and the normalisation of monitoring and surveillance. It aims to engage visitors to think more critically about their devices and interactions with technology, as well as the mechanisms and companies that create the environment of those technologies.
The exhibition set features posters, a color-by-number display, and a takeaway for visitors: the "Data Detox Kit." Two of the large-scale posters explore the companies behind the everyday technologies that we use like Alphabet and Facebook, and challenge visitors to think about how much data they give way through all their activities in their "Data Day."
The Glass Room is curated by the Tactical Tech Collective with support from Mozilla. The pop-up exhibit was brought to Tufts by Ellen McDonald, Research and Instruction Librarian at Ginn Library, and Chelcie Rowell, Head of Digital Scholarship at Tisch Library.
