Show me the Dataaaa! - Blog A

                The chapter on new literacies really peaked my interests. When looking at our lives, I never realized how much of it was run off of receiving and calculating data. All of these numbers and statistics are everywhere in our lives, but why? How do they enhance our living or us as people? What do we gain by having all of this data in our social and professional lives? When did being a data run country become so overwhelming?  All of these questions are very relevant to Thompson’s Smarter than You Think.

                Thompson describes that in the 2008 “Wordles” were used in to election and were a way of looking at what each candidate’s topics of interest were by seeing how many times words were used in their speeches. This is one of the more “simpler, and even fun to use” examples of data crunching that Thompson uses (p88). I had seen these word collages before where words that are more important are in a bigger font, but everything revolves around a central, in fact I have one in my room as a poster, but I never knew that they actually had a specific name. When I read about this idea of data crunching I realized my ninth grade English teacher had using this same concept when we wrote papers. She had a rule that was “no two sentences start with the same word” so when we would have to turn in a paper we have to do multiple drafts just to make sure that we were varying our language and not stating every sentence with “then”, “I think”, “the,” etc. This was how the Spanish teacher at the Florida International University used Wordles to help her student improve their vocabulary by making it more diverse (p89). Thus, even in our writing we are trying to use data to better our skills and end result.

                Another point that Thompson makes is that not everyone will want to develop data literacy, and while I think that is true, I think that each person in our world craves data (p91). In social media today, everything is about numbers. When posting a picture to Instagram, or tweeting, or writing a status on Facebook, all the user wants is to see how many likes or re-tweets they receive. Those numbers show how accepted their post is by their peers, so these numbers are crucial to their involvement. Many people take down posts after a little while if they are not receiving any activity on them. It is as if it is a statistical outlier and to not throw off their data they need to remove that test sample to have their data come out to a better number. The idea is actually ridiculous, but to keep up a “popular image” and keep you numbers high, this idea radiates through social media users everywhere. Even trending topics on social media are chosen through numbers because of activity around them.  Thus, something that seems like the opposite of statistical data driven is in fact just as numbers based as actual business data.

                Lastly, when thinking about why our society desires to have data is because it is a concrete way of getting answers and making our lives easier. Just like the example that Thompson used in the beginning of the literacy chapter about the election districts and how using the stats on who lived where actually made them all fairer districts than ever before (p86). So even though many of us have to learn “a new literacy” with all of the applications that can be used to help simplify everything, it makes it easier in the long run. With any marketing advertisement or new product or sales pitch, the question when everything is underway is “How are the numbers?” This question is the only way to see how the campaign or product is doing. With marketing it is hard because it is extremely hard to tell if you ads were in fact the reason that your product was being purchased or if there were other outside circumstances, but having the data and being able to pinpoint specific stats aid in getting more concrete answers. As you can see in this article, businesses are now hiring “data scientists” to help with investing. I found it amazing that there is actually a profession called data scientist, but I do agree that finding, calculating, and looking at the correct data to get an answer is a science. Moreover, the data has definitely had an impact on the business world.

 Overall, with the emergence of a static driven society, our social world and professional world are both affected. People are looking to find numbers in their daily lives in every aspect of it. I mean even this blog site breaks down how many views and comments we have on each post, again another set of small data that keeps enforcing the presence of numbers in our lives. Thus the importance of the data can be small or large, but people are craving it more than ever to have access to easy and direct answers.