Making big data more human-sized
I really enjoyed Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction. It takes something that can seem quite abstract — big data — and makes it relevant to the individual. And that got me thinking about how critical storytelling is to our understanding and ultimately, management of technology’s more disruptive effects. But also that telling stories about something as broad as the data-driven technological and societal changes we’re living through right now requires many different types of storytellers.
Joining the dots, finding a narrative arc
Technological disruption impacts the fabric of society on multiple levels and in nonlinear ways. This makes it hard to join the dots and make sense of it. It’s not always obvious how the same technology is simultaneously driving benefits in one sphere and negative outcomes in another, or the full extent to which it is doing either. So, for example, it’s difficult to gauge whether Airbnb is having as big a negative impact on availability of local housing stock, as its critics claim. Ditto, the arguments about its unfair advantage over hotels and B&Bs that are rendered less competitive because they have to pay taxes that Airbnb doesn’t (even though it’s kind of in the same business). And even if there is some merit to these criticisms, does it outweigh the benefits from tourists spending money in local businesses and with the private citizens who act as hosts, as Airbnb argues?
These complicated relationships make it really hard to understand quite what we’re dealing with or how to manage things fairly. And that in turn triggers complicated, ambivalent feelings about data and technology and those behind it — Uber, anyone? Without frameworks for processing and channeling this angst in creative or helpful ways, there’s a risk of it morphing into anger or corrosive, cynical helplessness.
Society has been here before (well, kind of)
The pace of technological change is greater than it’s ever been but the sort of large scale disruption it can wreak isn’t entirely new. There are lessons we can draw from how people came to terms with and managed the impact of the industrial revolution. And more pertinently (to this blog post anyway) we can learn how storytelling and storytellers helped facilitate that.
Storytellers sought to engage people’s emotions as well as their intellect, and covered a broad spectrum of people. On the one hand you had artists such as Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby, both of whom seemed broadly optimistic about the revolution. In their art, you can see their impressions of the progress, excitement and opportunity the age was ushering in.
On the other hand, the Romantic artist William Blake raged against the industrial revolution and the reductionism he felt it legitimised. And the impressionism of artists such as Gauguin and Van Gogh seems a direct reaction to the precision of the increasingly machine-driven age.
Writers and thinkers as varied as: Adam Smith (in The Wealth of Nations), Charles Dickens (in novels such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield), Elizabeth Gaskell (in her novel, Mary Barton), John Ruskin (in his book, Unto This Last) and Friedrich Engels (in his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England), as well as popular journalists like William Cobbett, were also exploring, celebrating or critiquing the way industrialisation was changing the political, economic and social fabric of society. And in so doing they gave people frameworks for thinking about the changes they were living through but also what ‘good should look like’. And that in turn, provided the backdrop for the political manoeuvring involved in balancing competing views and desired outcomes.
These storytellers were active in different periods but this type of storytelling-enabled exploration wasn’t limited to one or two decades. That’s because the reverberations from the industrial revolution extended well beyond its inception. So by the time LS Lowry was depicting the industrial landscape in the 1930s and 40s he was presenting it as a matter of fact, which was exactly how his contemporaries experienced industrialisation.
Who are the storytellers for our time?
I‘ve written before about about the role of artists in helping us understand and figure out how to navigate our new world of pervasive data . More recently it was Julie Freeman’s installation, A Naked Mole Rat Eutopia that did that thing that good art is supposed to do; it made me think and feel. I loved that the installation was powered by live data and the way it translated data that can often feel ephemeral into something tangible. This Chips with Everything podcast episode features a lovely interview with Julie Freeman about her installation, among other things. It’s worth a listen.
I’m also really excited by the Open Data Institute’s Data as Culture programme which focuses on works that use data as art material. And I’ve enjoyed the exploration of our evolving relationship with technology in pop culture through TV programmes like Black Mirror and more recently, Dr Who (see episode 5 of Series 10, if you’re interested). Given the broader demographic of the latter, this is even more pleasing. ProPublica’s Surya Mattu and Julia Angwin are two journalists I’m aware of who are writing stories about data and technology’s social justice implications. This is great because too often these types of stories are reduced to ‘tech news’.
But on the whole I’ve struggled to find good quality, mainstream storytelling that explores data and how it’s impacting the way we live and run our society. I think this is a problem. As I’ve written before, we need better conversations about data and technology. And for that to happen we need to embed them in mainstream discussions about culture, politics and the economy. I think that’s the way we make data and technology human-sized.
