[478] Big DaDa

I think society takes “progress” as an inevitability. Eventually we’ll have a pluralistic resource based scientific underpinning that guides our actions and future. People won’t go hungry, and we’ll be able to predict, if not flatly manipulate the weather. You’ll have backup organs stored away or will upload your personality into a computer to interface with the universe for as long as you stay plugged in. Or, maybe I’ve spent a little too much time in /r/futurology.

In any event, I think as a consequence of this enduring faith in technology and information, we assume a generalized “more is better.” More options, more distractions, more “opportunities” that will, let’s see if I can nail the language, help us “self-actualize” and “grow” in a rising tides kind of fashion. Our governmental organizations want your spending habits and every quip catalogued. They want supercomputers to sort through it all and give percentages about who’s dangerous and who’s not. We want body cam footage. We want statistics and papers and papers to contradict those papers.

I think we’re doing it backwards. When you feel compelled to collect data at NSA levels, it’s clearly related to ideas about control. If you practice a little humility and perspective about the nature of control, you look for other ways to exhibit it. That is, you seek to control yourself in spite of others or you look for information volunteered. I think we overlook how much we volunteer.

I just wrote about insecurity, for example. People don’t take to facebook and write ten pages about what they’re really afraid of or how beyond crippled they’d be if the toothpicks propping up their life snap. They make an offhanded comment. Ironically, they also phrase too deliberately. They disappear a little creepily hardcore into a hobby. The deeper information still comes out. Perhaps we’re too polite to ever bring it up, but it’s there.

I think data is used in service to the idealism. What does it tell you that 27% of high school teens reported feeling stressed about their financial future? Anything? If you’re familiar even remotely with questionnaires or teenagers, the best you can walk away with is a jolt to maybe talk to them more or plan a little more diligently in case of an emergency. The kind of sage patently obvious wisdom you hopefully take into parenting anyway. Did the team who crafted the questions, sat down the teens, and reported their findings ever think out the end game? Ideally, they’re helping inform you, right? Realistically, they’ve maybe washed your brain in another errant statistic.

I want less data. I want what people are already saying to simply be acknowledged, and not just when it’s related in facebook-friendly ways. I want the thousands of years of experience and potential wisdom to trigger action, or not. It’s why I feel my tasks regarding data management or helping the conversation are fairly easy. Everything I want is already there, it’s just a puzzle. I don’t need to cut out a niche so much as point to it. Hopefully, I’ll do it in a way that gets other people speaking up as well.