Big Bad Data & You

Intangible things are in danger.

Big Data (aka: the pestilence) has erased nuance and care in how we communicate, work, exist and interact.

I'm pretty sure the "sharing economy" is dead. Actually stillborn since it never was a fully developed idea. We're seeing an impressive resilience to the data-benefit trade off.


How do you "quantify" a discussion?

I volunteer to teach an adult literacy class and I'm hard pressed at the end of the month to calculate my hours so that the funding keeps coming. How do you explain the supremacy of data to emotion and art?

In the last few years, there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list.

"The United States of Metrics," by Bruce Feiler, New York Times, May 16, 2014