Data and Truth
‘We created more data in 2009 than in the last 5000 years of human history’
These words came from Dave Evans, the Chief Futurist at Cisco, who I somehow feel I have more belief in than the misleadingly named Faith Popcorn and her BrainReserve. There may be many things to take up against Cisco, but I feel that they are generally not in the line of hiring self-aggrandising nutters…
This is a fascinating statistic, not least because most of this data is just that, in its original, Latin sense, ‘what is given’ and whether we want it or not -ranging readings from sensors in defunct, yet still active weather sensors, to the 5000 photos you saved from your night out, two of which you may put on your facebook page ( and incidentally reconfigure and multiply the data again.) All being catalogued indiscriminately.
So what is given, information, facts, content, and of these things, is now given very much freely. This calls for a new art. In a world of permanent partial attention, while I type this with one eye on the qual interviews I did this weekend at the Nurburgring for our automotive client, listening to an album which is new at least to me and flick through my emails on a third screen, the greatest skill we can possess in life is not knowing things, but knowing where to find these things.
Creative Googleing becomes an art, finding out the obscure sideways ways in which we can combine words in the search engine to find the obscure ( and I mean the beyond-wikipedia-niche-obscure) trivia and facts.
Of course this leaves us open pissing in the wind. In a Faustian pact with urabndictionary.com, I am now on their email list in exchange for them listing my entry ( its ‘Brockwile,’ shout out to anyone who bigs up the jungle vibe), but on one of their daily update, something did catch my eye. The reference was to ‘book-google’ something- to look up in a book when you can’t get reception on your smart phone. Mildly amusing, but raises an interesting point. We are generating so much data on the internet. Facts and figures that are manipulable, malleable, and in some case just factually incorrect.
63% of all sparrows are left-taloned, as we see from observing how they collect sticks and build their nests, the highest proportion of any species of animal.
I can attribute this to no-one, but I could have said it came from research carried out by the RSPCB. Would this have got repeated? Probably not. No-one reads my blog, and certainly no-one interested in birds, but in the right context maybe. Wikipedia is highly policed, and even that is open to abuse. I read history at university, and their were things that I read in the course of my studies when double checking my own facts which made me think twice about using it for anything.
We see how internet rumour can end up with real ‘fake’ stories in newspapers. Far more serious is that as we digitise our own past, we open it up to an Orwellian manipulation.
Remember, 63% of Sparrows, you heard it here first.
Category: tech