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January 29 - January 31, 2021
When websites pose questions directly to their users, we have a chance not only to refine borders but to show they don’t really exist as normally conceived.
where people can’t find satisfaction in person, they create alternative digital communities. On a dating site, that means communities with similar sexual interests. On other sites with more diverse aims, where the users aren’t just there to flirt in groups of two (and occasionally three), you get something richer.
Reddit is the fulfillment of that earliest ambition of the Internet—to bring far-flung people together to talk, debate, share, spread news, and laugh. To collapse space and create personal closeness.
The site itself is just a raw list of links submitted by the users, who vote, and comment, and comment on the comments, and modify, and repost all day long, in what feels like the world’s biggest group of friends sitting on the world’s longest couch.
Imagined Communities,
Anderson’s main topics are nationalism and nation-building and he suggests that a nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
Earlier we saw the ancient rush to communal violence, as directed at Safiyyah, Natasha, and Justine on Twitter. Here, on Reddit, we see a few of nationhood’s better angels: belonging, sympathy, sharing.
We’d heard Austin was cool, so we went there. It’s a lightweight example, but group movements like this, based on little more than word of mouth and hope for something better, created the world as we know it.
Communities move to find an environment that will sustain them and where they are safe, but also to find a physical place that reflects what they feel within.
And I can’t help but wonder, too, does everyone have a book that follows them until they read it? And, if so, what is theirs?
Bass Ale’s triangle logo was the first registered trademark in the English-speaking world, and today that sturdy oldness is a big part of the brand’s appeal. They lay it down right there on the label—“England’s first registered trademark.”
But what they don’t tell you is that Bass was only first because a brewery employee happened to be first in the queue at the registrar’s office the morning that Britain’s Trademark Registration Act took effect.
as far as branding has come, in many ways it will probably always be a Bronze Age science, because the emotions it plays to are eternal.
In 1997, Tom Peters, a motivational speaker and management consultant, published an article called “The Brand Called You” in Fast Company magazine, and the era of personal branding was born.
You can see the birth of the idea and its subsequent rise through mentions in print via Google Books.
The new part is that “personal branding” asks you to accomplish these ends by treating yourself like a product rather than a human being.
The mainstream culture of the service is organized around that one-to-many communication, organized, in fact, around the brand. But black users tend to focus on personal use and are highly reciprocal—hence high-follower counts and the enhanced ability to launch memes to the top of the charts.
Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world. It’s a by-product of the basic physical nature of the microchip: a chip is just a sequence of tiny gates.
Not in the way that the Internet is a “series of tubes” but in actuality. The gates open and close to let electrons through, and when one of these gates wants to know what state to be in, it’s all or nothing—like any door, a circuit is open or it isn’t; there are no shades of maybe. From that microscopic reality an absolutism propagates up through the whole enterprise, until at the highest level you have the definitions, data types, and classes
Experiments are built upon reducing a process to a single, manageable facet. The scientific method needs a control, and you can’t get it without cutting complexity to the bald core and saying this, this, is what matters. Only once you’ve simplified the question can you test it over and over again. Whether at a lab bench or a laptop, most of the knowledge we possess was acquired like this, by reduction.
It’s science as pointillism. Those dots may be one fractional part of you, but the whole is us.
This kind of unwanted intercession is all too easy on social media because everything is so quantified. The hashtags jump right to the brand manager’s screen; he dives in with the discounts.
You know the science is headed to undiscovered country when someone can hear your parents fighting in the click-click-click of a mouse.
Data journalism was brought to the mainstream by Nate Silver, but it’s become a staple of reporting: we quantify to understand. The Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian have all built impressive analytic and visualization teams and continue to devote resources to publishing the data of our lives, even in the constrained financial climate for reporters and their work.
There’s Flu and the work of Stephens-Davidowitz, but also a raft of even more ambitious, if less publicized, projects, such as Constitute—a data-based approach to constitution design. The citizens of most countries are usually only concerned with one constitution—their own—but Google has assembled all nine hundred such documents drafted since 1787. Combined and quantified, they give emerging nations—five new constitutions are written every year—a better chance at a durable government because they can see what’s worked and what hasn’t in the past.
Here, data unlocks a better future because, as Constitute’s website points out: in a constitution, “even a single comma can make a huge difference.”
Alex Pentland at MIT calls the emerging science “social physics.” He and his team have begun moving social data to the physical world. Working with local government, communications providers, and citizens, they’ve datafied an entire city.
new laws will be drafted with all the right spirit, I’m sure, but their letter will be outdated before the ink is dry. And being on the data collectors’ side myself, I’ve seen firsthand that you can give people all the privacy controls in the world, but most people won’t use them.
He proposes that data collectors issue micropayments to users whenever their data is sold. But that expense, like a tax, either will be passed directly back to the consumer or will bring on a race to the bottom, where websites have to find margin wherever they can get it, the way commercial airlines do now. Either way, there’s no net value in it for us. And that’s not to mention the impracticality of making it happen.
whenever the technology and the devices and the algorithms seem just too epic, we must all recall Tennyson’s aging Ulysses and resolve to search for our truth in a slightly different way.
To use data to know yet not manipulate, to explore but not to pry, to protect but not to smother, to see yet never expose, and, above all, to repay that priceless gift we bequeath to the world when we share our lives so that other lives might be better—and to fulfill for everyone that oldest of human hopes, from Gilgamesh to Ramses to today: that our names be remembered, not only in stone but as part of memory itself.
My second decision, to leave out statistical esoterica, was made with much less regret. I don’t mention confidence intervals, sample sizes, p values, and similar devices in Dataclysm because the book is above all a popularization of data and data science. Mathematical wonkiness wasn’t what I wanted to get across. But like the spars and crossbeams of a house, the rigor is no less present for being unseen.
“Correlation does not imply causation” is a good thing for everyone to keep in mind—and an excellent check on narrative overreach. But a snappy phrase doesn’t mean that the question of causation isn’t itself interesting, and I’ve tried to attribute causes only where they are most justified.
This data of our lives, being itself practically a living thing, is always changing.
Time after time, I—and the many other people doing work like me—have had to devise methods, structures, even shortcuts to find the signal amidst the noise. We’re all looking for our own Parsons code. Something so simple and yet so powerful is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, but luckily there are a lot of lifetimes out there. And for any problem that data science might face, this book has been my way to say: I like our odds.
