Big Data: A Contribution to the Art of Storytelling
Steve Lohr’s 2012 New York Times article “The Age of Big Data” heralds an age where Big Data and its careers will become increasingly valued. In his opinion, we hit the point of no return: “Data is in the driver’s seat.”
According to Lohr, Big Data pervades nearly every educative field and profession: economics, journalism, dating sites, retail, and so much more. It makes life more exact and scientific, although there are a few causes for concern.
There are many ways for Big Data to be messed up and misconstrued. Lohr speaks of “false discoveries”: mistaking causes and connections for nothing more than meaningless correlations. He warns of the disapproval of privacy advocates and the possibility of unfair discriminations or stereotypes, which may have no legitimate connection to the person at all that they are judging, but are based on just numbers, searches, and falsely created patterns.
But as quickly as Lohr introduces Big Data’s potential problems, he dismisses them. For him, these issues are unimportant in comparison to the exciting new possibilities. Big Data is “cool”.
I don’t agree with this idea. I believe that simply allowing Big Data to take the driver’s seat is throwing human experience out the window. It certainly has its uses, and the method is “cool”, but I believe it should take more of a supplementary role.
As Lohr points out in the opening of his article, the career opportunities for data analysts are massive. He presents Mo Zho, a women picked up by I.B.M. just after her graduation from Yale. A year later, USA Today reported the “sexiest job of the 21st Century” is a data analyst, offering a large salary and competitive benefits. Just last week, Forbes Magazine heralded female contributions to math and science, with a focus on (of course) Big Data. Again, it is refereed to as one of “today’s hottest careers”.
Lohr is right: Big Data is here to stay. And — to an extent — that is a good thing. We can learn from Big Data; we can use it as a lead or tip to pursue stories as journalists, as political scientists to see how ideas resonate with the public, and as retailers to provide the best products for customers. The problem I run into is when Big Data becomes the only source of information and we lose out on the human experience.
Like the debate between STEM and liberal arts education, and the many tensions surrounding Common Core (for example — its testing http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/americans-opting-out-of-common-core-tests-in-droves/), the danger of Big Data is that it alienates one type of learning. Just as many people learn better visually or verbally, there are also primarily scientifically inclined or primarily artistically inclined individuals. As N. Katherine Hayles remarks in her essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”, perhaps a combination of two types of learning (in her case, the hyper attention that often pairs with today’s technological phenomena of instant gratification and the critical skills of deep reading) is the best way to reach all audiences. The empirical evidence provided by data is convincing — many times because of its shock value — but alone it is less powerful and less accessible to all than when it is paired with storytelling.
Storytelling has been a profession since the beginning of time, and let’s face it: if it has lasted this long, its probably here to stay. Oral storytellers were the historians of their societies; they spoke to their communities in ways that resonated with their realities, dreams, and trials. Homer’s epics “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” gave us an insight into the imagination of the ancient world. Thucydides’ “The History of the Peloponnesian War” is often quoted as the first attempt at history, showing us the advanced minds and battle tactics of the Greeks but in the form of a narrative. Fast forward to the Christian Bible: a book centered on teaching faith, morals, and values through stories. Even later, the printing press allowed for a thrust in literacy and the main vehicle for storytelling further transitioned to printed forms. And in modern times, we have experienced the advent of technology: a new platform for these centuries old techniques.
It is only since the explosion of interest in Big Data that we have begun to see worry and fear about the loss of the magic of storytelling and the excitement of learning. Nicholas Carr voices this worry in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, an article published in The Atlantic that grapples with the struggle that the author and others have experienced: the inability to sit down and focus on a long, classic novel. Our attention has become so diverted in different directions that we can barely focus; Carr worries we don’t have the attention span to comprehend more than a bit at a time. Others, such as Clay Shirky, disagree with Carr and believe that there is so much potential in the abundance of information we have access to.
I believe in a combination of the ideas of these two men. As Hayles pointed out, people learn differently. Some people are just never going to pick up that classic novel, but if a chart of data helps them understand information then we should encourage that. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that the novel loses its worth. We are a generation perhaps spoiled by technology and the instant gratification it brings, but we are still telling stores — maybe just not in the traditional sense.
Digital media allows us to use new ways to engage in storytelling. We can tell stories that are multi-dimensional, often interactive, and utilize multimedia platforms — but an important connection is that they are all still stories. The narrative that runs through them is what has made professions like journalism prevail through the incredible advancements in technology even just in the past decade.
The Data Journalism Handbook, edited by Jonathan Gray, Liliana Bounegru, and Lucy Chambers, gives a persuasive account of why journalists should pay attention to and learn how to use Big Data to improve their profession. While many of the journalistic professionals who are quoted appear entirely captivated and dependent on Big Data above all else, people like Cynthia O’Murchu of The Financial Times seem to be on the same wavelength as me. She says: “Data journalism is another way to scrutinize the world … While numbers can be interesting, just writing about the data is not enough. You still need to do the reporting to explain what it means.”
O’Murchu speaks to exactly what I believe Lohr misses: Big Data is just an addition to the toolkit of storytelling. The human experience cannot be shared only through numbers, but numbers and data can add a meatiness to it that allows cognitive comprehension for a growing number of people. We are learning in new ways, but that does not negate the old ones. Storytelling has earned its place in humanity — Big Data is just the newest weapon for us to add to an already rich arsenal of communication.
