This morning read a Business Week online article titled "There's Gold in "Reality Mining," which details all the information social scientists and marketers think can be gleaned from tracking human behavior via the ever growing usage of electronic devices, whether online or mobile. Interesting piece. Yet it also leaves you feeling as a bit queezy about being tracked and questioning our emerging delight, indeed deep dive, into data.
Earlier today had a meeting with clients interested in my firm's help selling a process designed to help businesses via a complex survey process directed at customers. What they were selling, again, was data. Then I'd stumbled on to a Slate.com dialogue between Steven Johnson (mentioned in my last post) and
Manjoo believes all our media and information technology have served less as expansive sources of truth and more to amplify a cascade of highly filtered narratives buttressing parochial world views, right wing and left. Steven Johnson suggested Manjoo explore the 1960s, when there was less media and opinions and "facts" could be similarly siloed.Paraphrasing Freud's idea that when you're obsessed about sex, you'll see it everywhere, I guess all I'm seeing everywhere is the world's obsession with data. Which has become mine. So I went the one place I thought could shed final light on the matter. Youtube.
The first thing I found was this video, Jim Cramer, trying to defend himself from charges of that he'd told his audience last week not to sell Bear Stearns stock just before it nose dived. Cramer's sweaty pleas interest me much less than the government's bailout, an act whose implications are really difficult to understand, and the tv showman's cries part of a larger chorus that resounds with the cracking of authority. For all our data, we only know so much.
And yet looking on Youtube I realized that I was as dependent on data, an addict as much as anyone. More specifically, my crack cocaine is meta-data, data about data. And YouTube's star ratings, it's new feature showing what videos are being watched by the most people that very minute, it's various metrics are all part of the package. Anyway, thinking about Steven Johnson's retort about the 1960s, I navigated to clips from the period, and then wandered into footage of public debates, finding a whole bunch of scenes of Bob Dylan. There's something both quiet and very noisy about the quality of the black and white film that is leaves me both nostalgic but also inspired. About? I'm not sure. Life, I guess. As if I'm a bit closer to some type of essence or truth.
Perhaps it's a bit too easy in problematic or confusing times to jump to the past. Here a past when cameras may have shot our images but as individuals and a society we were not so permanently tracked. Yes, it's easy but also satisfying, somehow calming to look at the crowds of people massed collectively for a civil rights march. Their faces all look serious but curious. They look capable of being honestly moved by Dylan, a voice who stirred them as an individual, but also a voice expressing something larger than any of them individually, of their power as a mass.
In truth, YouTube also provides videos that show at times how big a bastard Dylan was. But in all, it's interesting to see how fast we fly. How easily absorbed we are in bytes of information and yet how difficult it is to get traction today. Find a truth in the public sphere that galvanizes something creative. Something beyond religion that people will spend time connecting around. Some truth.Economies may not be built on fundamental truths, but they are built on fundamental agreements.
And I guess that's my point. What's happening in today's American economy (and because of interdependence, the world's) the surplus of data makes all our agreements simultaneously more transparent and opaque. More open to be looked at at times, but opaque because we don't always know what information we need to really judge the value of those agreements. Or which agreements are most important to us. How concerned, for instance, should someone who is not an investor be about the growth of hedge funds? How much is the Iraq War going to cut into future economic needs? What is important to do with our tax money, where should the money go? On an on. So for the mass of us, who might act collectively to impact how information gets used, we're overwhelmed.
To put it differently, information plenitude suggests infinite possibilities. Indeed, it provides ample resources to build businesses, organize ourselves, get easy access to new content and services, repackage what we have and create new things of value. But maybe all that information richness also leads to a perpetual sense that nothing can be ultimately ascertained. That truth went out with the gold standard. Or more accurately, because we have all this information, because of the networked connections where the streets are electronic grids rich with feedback loops that measure our every move... it's a bit like a gun on a table in a stage play. All that information needs to get used or there's a sense of waste. Precisely because there's so much, we want to use it. Even though thinking coherently about who has it, and how it gets used, is more of a challenge.
Knowing what questions to ask and of what as well as who, that's the conundrum. And therefore many people just freeze up, which is the opposite of what my partner here, Titus, characterizes as so important to healthy economies: circulation. We can get stuck. Or instead of taking time to think through things, we act impulsively, as in fast times lack of action is so counter-intuitive. So our circulation doesn't coalesce into anything powerful, it just is people bumping into each other. But I'm getting a bit too abstract. So I'll suggest some worthwhile circulation. Check out the dialogue between Steven Johnson and Farhad Manjoo. It's interesting. Or go to YouTube here and check out the very youthful looking Dylan who, after initial rambling, gives an equally boyish Donavan a chance to sing a song, then follows with one of his own. More data, but interesting, all.
Jonathan Field
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