Ritmos Latinos

This is a photo of my father. The woman with whom he is dancing is not my mother, though I am old enough to be her father.

I stumbled upon this photo on Blogger last night while searching on my last name to see if my nascent blog would turn up.

My blog was among the results.

So was with a student essay about Ella Fitzgerald that cited
an article I wrote for Good Times in 1996.

Also among the results was the blog featuring this photo.

Here's the photo in its original context. The news clip is dated September 6. My mother was overseas at the time, attending to an ill sibling.

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There was a programmer with whom I worked who used to say 'data is data,' and I was somehow reminded of him when I saw this photo.

While the morals at play are suspect even to those who know nothing of my father, he is certainly doing nothing illegal or even elicit. And while he has never mentioned Daniela Teoc, he makes no secret of the fact that he goes out dancing with people that no one in our family knows.

Can the photo be explained away as a data set that merely activates phosphors and diodes? If so, rumination ends right here. But if not, what is it that imbues this data set with meaning above and beyond its mapped color values? Or put another way, from where does the data get its subjective metadata? And exactly what have I done by taking this publicly available data set and repackaging it here? The data set is an exact duplicate of the original but it would seem that the the subjective meta data has been manipulated by the data set's new context.

Data is our Christmas lists, our Blogs, our music, our home movies and feature films, our professional life, our life's savings, our self-expression, our greatest works of art, and our greatest protection against tyranny. But we have to be mindful of the data we generate explicitly (as I am doing right now) and implicitly (as my father and Daniela did on September 6). For while data is data, so too is data married to subjective meta data powerful enough to inspire, to nurture, to excite, to hurt, to destroy, and to ruin lives.