A few random headlines from the NYTimes late last week.
A Company Promises the Deepest Data Mining Yet
Push to Limit the Tracking of Web Surfers' Clicks
States' Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
So when my blog partner Titus, writing about addressing structural elements that impacted this latest economic crisis, said we need to really look into the data, my first thought was... yikes. What data do we start with? Our lives are saturated with data, principally because of the ubiquity of digital technology.
At essence, such technology is composed of tool sets designed for organizing, analyzing and delivering different types of information, from currency figures to entertainment content. Ultimately, it ends up creating a even more information a bit like this scene from Disney's Fantasia.
Data exploration is becoming more and more difficult, not because we lack information but because we're drowning in it.
In my profession of marketing, for instance,. there's been a big move from qualitative to quantitative research, an obsession with getting everything "quantified." And who can blame the clients. After a century of advertising characterized by (my approximation of) the statement "the problem isn't that only half my advertising works, it's I don't know which half," we finally have the data tools to start tracking what moves people, how they move, and where they move. And now we're going crazy with it.
Where ad agencies once spent buckets of money on endless numbers of focus groups (a highly lucrative living for group moderators and facilitators that made up that sector's infrastructure) the dollars are migrating to so-called "quant jocks," folks, companies and tools that can graph every movement of the customer, voter, or segment an organization is interested in pursuing - for good or bad purposes. In truth, it makes sense. Why go for abstractions when you can identify real world action? As technology like Tivo comes along, for instance, letting us customize our viewing habits, programmers can better just what people value enough to save and later watch on television. Theoretically, in turn value is created by such information with more producing more satisfying programs.
At core, markets are efficient in that they deliver accurate information. With increased efficiencies provided by these new technologies, we should get even better information. That said, the situation today reminds me a bit of what the very smart cultural critic Greg Beato suggested to me in an interview in early 2004. Talking about the internet, he pointed out that if we didn't create any totally new applications, but just started to better figure out how to use existing internet protocols, we might be better off. Similarly, reading Titus and scanning the New York Times, I wondered whether what we need is not more information but better ways to approach it.
In one sense, that's a matter of smart interfaces. Just as the internet existed before Netscape, the latter's profound impact was as a browser it gave the masses ways to access all that amazing data and then extend it. Similarly, to understand an economic whirlwind like that of todays, perhaps we need some type of designed interface to connect the dots between all the pieces. But that takes an approach, an intelligence with a certain world-view that has an understanding of how to approach the data before starting to design any way to use it. More simply, it requires asking the "right questions."
All to say, ultimately we can track all we want, but it's a bit like a camera that endlessly points at the world and shoots reams of pictures. Some will be interesting. Many more won't. It's not just having the data. It's having the right data. Which at times means more transparency in certain markets, as the following articles make clear.
Can't Grasp the Credit Crisis? Join the Club
Who Created This Monster
And finally it really is figuring out what data is worth knowing and how to look at it. All to say that, at least partially, the crisis we're living in now may result from obsession around data as obsessive consumption of more frequently blamed things.
Finally: For a brilliant book that defines the importance of interface, read Steven Johnson's terrific Interface Culture, for me a defining exploration of modern culture but also business, as brands are, in a sense, themselves interfaces, ways for different parties and pieces to interact. More on that in a different post.
Jonathan Field
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