July, 2010
Your entire life is spent absorbing, processing, analyzing and storing data. But you probably don’t call it “data”. You probably call it “the news”, or “gossip”, or “information” or whatever. It’s warm and rainy today. The soup of the day is split pea. That man is wearing a blue tie. There are three eggs left in the refrigerator. That shoe smells bad. This is very hot. Big or small, important or seemingly insignificant, every sight, sound, taste, smell and feeling you experience every second of every day is recorded as data. A lifetime of information, stored right there behind your eyes. These tiny data events are taking place constantly and over time become a larger collection of data known as “experience”. This database in your brain is the cumulative result of everything you have ever experienced. This is your frame of reference, which provides the context through which you view the world. So how do you manage your data? How does your frame of reference inform and influence how you manage new information? How do you apply the data you have acquired to your daily life? And perhaps most importantly, how do you guard against those who would seek to manipulate you by interfering with the data that you take in or the way you use it?
“… we just had the fifth anniversary of YouTube and the twelfth of Google, and between them, they're killing off a great institution: lying. You just can't lie anymore -- facts are too easy to check …” – Bill Maher (Real Time)
What is a lie, but intentionally incorrect data designed to provoke a behavior desired by the provider of that data? We see it everywhere, from advertisements making bogus claims to baby-kissing politicians and street corner con artists; people passing along false data in order to get other people to engage in behaviors they otherwise would not. Massive quantities of time and money are spent by people of all stripes and motivations to put data in front of you, true or otherwise, to alter your behavior to one that is more beneficial to them, often at your expense.
The good news is that you no longer have to blindly accept as truth what others tell you. You have all the resources you need, literally at your fingertips, to filter out the bad data and get to the truth. But do you use it?
“You can’t handle the truth!” – Col. Nathan R. Jessep (A Few Good Men)
A great many people believe that marijuana should be/remain illegal. Probably a majority, depending on where you are at the moment. If you are not one of them feel free to sit this section out. If you are one of those who believe that pot should be illegal, write down as many of the reasons as you can think of why. Look at that list. This is a list of opinions you have based on information you’ve collected over your lifetime; from your parents, friends, teachers, the media, whoever. This is a part of your belief system. But there is a problem: every single item on that list can be debunked in seconds by anyone with access to Google and a pinch of curiosity. This is the truth: there is absolutely, positively zero evidence in any credible study, medical journal or any source whatsoever that marijuana is harmful to people. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the United States alone tobacco and alcohol-related deaths average over 500,000 annually. Estimates as to how many fast-food-devouring Americans die each year due to obesity-related illnesses vary between 300,000-400,000. And the number of deaths related to marijuana anywhere in the world in the entirety of recorded human history? Zero. Not even one. So here we have three of the top killers of Americans, cigarettes, alcohol and junk food, taking the lives of almost one million every single year in that country alone … yet the possession and consumption of all of these things is perfectly legal, even encouraged. Marijuana is but a harmless, benign plant.
These are the facts. These are the data. Even a study commissioned by the United States government under former Republican President Richard Nixon (no fan of hippy culture by any stretch of the imagination) concluded that cannabis poses no credible risk of any kind and recommended that the ban on marijuana be lifted, even going as far as to declare the prohibition unconstitutional (which it is). The study was, of course, immediately buried by the government which instead intensified their efforts to propagate false data and issue more disinformation. Take some time to check it out for yourself. The facts are there and readily available. Visit www.google.com. This is just one seemingly innocuous example, but it begs the question: if they are willing to go to these lengths to mislead you about something so minor, then what other data are they misleading you about? War? Yes, Nixon lied about that too. Prolifically.
The next question that must be asked is what will you now do with this new set of data? Will you replace your old, incorrect data with the new, accurate data? If not, why not? Will this information cause you to eat better? Exercise more? Will you stop using alcohol and tobacco? Will you be more cautious about accepting what you are told by others? Will you use this data to better inform you decisions going forward, or will you dismiss it? How do you process information that contradicts everything you’ve been told to believe your whole life?
“It became very clear to me sitting out there today that every decision I've made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat - it's all been wrong.” – George Costanza (Seinfeld)
In every corner of the world we see people engaged in behaviors which are clearly not in their best interest. From the farms of Kansas to the streets of Detroit to the muddy tent cities of Port Au Prince to the slums of Mumbai we see people voting against their own economic best interests, procreating beyond their means, forgoing education and living amongst their own waste. Despite generations of acquired human knowledge and endless amounts of data demonstrating the self-destructive results of these types of behaviors, people seem determined to continue to engage in them to their own detriment, and often to their demise.
"The more I practice, the luckier I get." – Golfer, Arnold Palmer … or Gary Player (depending on which website you believe)
If content is king, then data is God. In digital media and marketing we capture and study behavioral data to better understand consumers in order to get a better idea of how to market goods and services to them. We observe how they interact with information we put in front of them in order to learn about their preferences and build context around our understanding of them as individuals. Relevance to the life of the consumer is the lifeblood of successful digital outreach. Without good data none of this is possible. Without good data we have no context for understanding the consumer and therefore no way of knowing what is relevant to their lives.
Several years ago I was having lunch in a coffee shop in Bangkok. In front of me was a cup of coffee, cream, a spoon and a napkin. There was just one piece missing from the puzzle. I called the waitress over and asked for “namtan”. Thai is a tonal language, which means that how you say a word, your tone and inflection, determines its meaning. So a word that might look the same a westerner actually has five often very different meanings depending on how you pronounce it. I apparently pronounced “namtan” incorrectly, drawing a blank look of total incomprehension. The waitress was unable to see past her immediate, limited understanding and intuit that what I was asking for was sugar. Imagine walking into a pizza shop in New York and asking for a slice of “beezzuh” and getting blank stares.
A few years back I was at a picnic on the beach in Connecticut when a friend arrived and announced to everyone that Russia had just invaded Georgia, and expressed concern that they might soon be coming north to Connecticut. Put aside for a moment the outlandish and preposterous idea that Russia would invade the United States … the fact that this person thought that we could enjoy a picnic on the beach as the United States was being invaded by Russia demonstrates a catastrophic failure of contextual understanding of the world and how things work. This was the result of not having enough data to be able to process this news event properly.
Farmer Ted: You know, I'm getting input here that I'm reading as relatively hostile. Samantha: Go to hell. Farmer Ted: Very hostile!(Sixteen Candles)
The beautiful thing about data is that, good or bad, it is always educational. Even negative feedback gives us insight into the world around us. Traveling the world one comes across numerous, often hilarious and inexplicable examples of the results of ignored data by souvenir peddlers. On a recent trip to Sri Lanka I was fascinated to find vendors waiting for tourists at the entrances to various attractions and temples, places that usually involved climbing numerous steps in intense heat to reach, selling (or attempting to sell) large, heavy, unwieldy items like (no exaggeration) brass nautical compasses, lanterns, oil paintings, large wooden sculptures and huge chunks of quartz rocks. There was not a bottle of water, an ice cream or even a moist towlette anywhere in sight. The last time I visited Cambodia’s infamous Tuosleng Genocide Museum I was surprised to find that the front display case of the gift shop was stocked full of feminine sanitary napkins. On several occasions I have been approached on the beaches of Cambodia by vendors offering shoe shines. At many tourist attractions you will still see people attempting to sell postcards to travelers with digital cameras who have just emerged from the location featured on the postcards. Many shops still sell 35mm camera film. I don’t even know where to buy a 35mm camera anymore. These people must hear “no” so often that you’d think they’d give up and try another line of work, or at least take the time to actually consider what product or service might be relevant to their target customer within the context of the situation. No such luck.
At another coffee shop several weeks ago, this time in Vietnam, my waitress brought me something I did not order. When I informed her that this was not what I had ordered she told me matter-of-factly that I could not return it. She was wrong. I did return it. I found out later that the store’s policy is to dock employee pay for the value of the mistaken order. In Vietnam that means that just one or two misplaced orders could wipe out an entire day’s paycheck. I’ve made mistakes before that have cost me a lot more than a day’s wages. I learned from those mistakes and do my best to not repeat them. If I had accepted her mistake she would never have realized that she had made the mistake, nor would she have had to pay a price for it. She would have learned nothing from her error. Consequences are what help us to learn and avoid unsuccessful behaviors. We can only learn from our mistakes if we’re aware that we’ve made them, and we won’t fully understand their magnitude unless we pay a penalty for them. This is part of the process of learning and growing. We’ve all stuck a finger in an electric socket at some point in our lives. Few of us have done it twice.
“If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.” – Jules (Pulp Fiction)
The danger of data, of course, is that it forces you to look the truth in the face and see things, including yourself, for what they actually are rather than what you wished they were. Be prepared, you might not always like what you see. The good news is that even the bad news is good news, because it’s yet another opportunity to learn and become better. It further enriches your context. It broadens your understanding and puts a little better focus on the world around you. The only question remaining is will you actually take time read the data … and will you act on it? Or will you keep doing what you’ve always done, just because that’s the way you’ve always done it. As they say, the truth will set you free. But only if you let it.
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