Dataclysm: A New Perspective
Normally I'm not a huge fan of nonfiction. Biographies bore me. I find most autobiographies and memoirs to be written by self-important people (says the girl writing a blog, ironic, I know). And those self-help books on how to eat right or how to stay young or how to become successful. Please. I don't need some self branded marketing guru turned inspirational speaker to tell me how to live my life. I think I can accomplish that on my own thank you very much.
But Datayclysm is something else entirely. Christian Rudder (Harvard math graduate, former SparkNotes employee, and OkCupid cofounder) has managed to write a book in a genre I often find uninformative and uninteresting, and turn it into something witty and insightful, not to mention thoroughly well-written for a math guy. Of course he's had some practice. Rudder is the keeper of OkCupid's data blog, OkTrends. I've never read the blog before attending his book talk, and he hasn't posted on it for some time, I suspect pausing to write this book, but being someone who, like him, is interested in people and very heavily involved in this burgeoning tech world we live in, this book and I were a perfect match.
Like many of my other reviews, I always have this fear that I'm giving too much away so I won't really speak all that much in detail about Rudder's many points. However, I would like to share a few interesting tidbits of information that he presents in Dataclysm. First, this book has changed my view on Twitter entirely. I used to think that Twitter was useless. Now I realize that Twitter is useless... for me, personally. But very useful for data science and understanding the human psyche. It's a powerful tool for the masses, even if most of its users are only thinking of themselves. And who can blame them? We all want to be heard. We all want people to care. It's just a little insane how much we measure our own success by how much others care about what we say (again coming from the girl with a blog but hey at least I've never bought Twitter followers!). Second, it is crazy just how much you can tell about a person just from looking at his or her friends on Facebook. Or the pattern of his or her likes. It's crazy how much you can tell about a person's race, gender, sexual orientation, or even personality and IQ just from a few of his or her words and interactions on social media sites!
And this leads to point number three: privacy vs. transparency. With the rate technology encroaches on our lives, it's not hard to imagine a future where everyone's data and information is made available and searchable. And while it is true that the more people contribute in to the web the more information we can gather and get out of it, at what point does this become ethically wrong? It's already ambiguous enough as it is with the government requesting user information from these companies we entrust with our emails, phone numbers, addresses, and personal communications. At the same time, this sort of data input and monitoring has also helped us detect and stop disease (Google Flu), track down the Boston Marathon bombers, and given us insight into humanity that no such tool has ever done before. It's important to remember these things as our world continues to become more and more digitized. And the data that Rudder analyzes in this book is so fresh and young. Some of these companies aren't even teenagers yet. Can you imagine what it will be like 50 years from now? When we live in a world where everyone's lives have been documented online since the day they were born?
Dataclysm doesn't provide answers to any of these questions. It doesn't tell you how to live your life in the most optimal way for a digital world. It just brings to the forefront these things we are all dealing with, whether we are aware of them or not. And I truly believe that the first step to understanding where we're headed is to acknowledge the issues at hand. This is not a book about how to make it big on the Internet (though it is kind of cool that the Internet has provided an outlet for the common man to be heard and seen). This is not a book advocating for the unavoidable technological era. It doesn't debate the merits of various products and features. It merely shows us who we are, when we think no one's looking.
But Datayclysm is something else entirely. Christian Rudder (Harvard math graduate, former SparkNotes employee, and OkCupid cofounder) has managed to write a book in a genre I often find uninformative and uninteresting, and turn it into something witty and insightful, not to mention thoroughly well-written for a math guy. Of course he's had some practice. Rudder is the keeper of OkCupid's data blog, OkTrends. I've never read the blog before attending his book talk, and he hasn't posted on it for some time, I suspect pausing to write this book, but being someone who, like him, is interested in people and very heavily involved in this burgeoning tech world we live in, this book and I were a perfect match.
Like many of my other reviews, I always have this fear that I'm giving too much away so I won't really speak all that much in detail about Rudder's many points. However, I would like to share a few interesting tidbits of information that he presents in Dataclysm. First, this book has changed my view on Twitter entirely. I used to think that Twitter was useless. Now I realize that Twitter is useless... for me, personally. But very useful for data science and understanding the human psyche. It's a powerful tool for the masses, even if most of its users are only thinking of themselves. And who can blame them? We all want to be heard. We all want people to care. It's just a little insane how much we measure our own success by how much others care about what we say (again coming from the girl with a blog but hey at least I've never bought Twitter followers!). Second, it is crazy just how much you can tell about a person just from looking at his or her friends on Facebook. Or the pattern of his or her likes. It's crazy how much you can tell about a person's race, gender, sexual orientation, or even personality and IQ just from a few of his or her words and interactions on social media sites!
And this leads to point number three: privacy vs. transparency. With the rate technology encroaches on our lives, it's not hard to imagine a future where everyone's data and information is made available and searchable. And while it is true that the more people contribute in to the web the more information we can gather and get out of it, at what point does this become ethically wrong? It's already ambiguous enough as it is with the government requesting user information from these companies we entrust with our emails, phone numbers, addresses, and personal communications. At the same time, this sort of data input and monitoring has also helped us detect and stop disease (Google Flu), track down the Boston Marathon bombers, and given us insight into humanity that no such tool has ever done before. It's important to remember these things as our world continues to become more and more digitized. And the data that Rudder analyzes in this book is so fresh and young. Some of these companies aren't even teenagers yet. Can you imagine what it will be like 50 years from now? When we live in a world where everyone's lives have been documented online since the day they were born?
Dataclysm doesn't provide answers to any of these questions. It doesn't tell you how to live your life in the most optimal way for a digital world. It just brings to the forefront these things we are all dealing with, whether we are aware of them or not. And I truly believe that the first step to understanding where we're headed is to acknowledge the issues at hand. This is not a book about how to make it big on the Internet (though it is kind of cool that the Internet has provided an outlet for the common man to be heard and seen). This is not a book advocating for the unavoidable technological era. It doesn't debate the merits of various products and features. It merely shows us who we are, when we think no one's looking.
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