26th May 2021. Data | Society
We need new metaphors for data; frameworks for social change
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#1: We need new metaphors for data
Data obviously isn’t the “new oil”, although you have to tip your hat to the first desperate entrepreneur into a VC pitch deck, whoever it was. Indeed, Cory Doctorow undermined that particular metaphor a couple of years ago when he described data as being more like “oily rags”.
But we desperately need a new metaphor that conveys some sense of the significance of data, to inform the way we all think about it and talk about it.
Anyway, that’s what Matt Locke, of the UK design agency Storythings, suggests in a recent newsletter.
As Locke points out, metaphor constructs meaning (George Lakoff has made the same point in the context of politics over a number of years). So it’s only when we have the right meaning that we can act in the right way—as he discusses in the context of the “hole” in the ozone layer:
It’s an odd metaphor, as there isn’t really an ozone layer, and the hole wasn’t really a hole, but the metaphor caught on with scientists, policy makers and the public. One of the reasons for its success might have been the visceral image of a hole in the earth’s atmosphere, and the associations of breached defences that created. This was the era of early video games like Space Invaders and Missile Command, where the player had to defend the earth by stopping alien attacks raining down.
The problem with the “data is oil” story is that it both makes it abstract (“passive, untapped resources”) and puts the businesses that process it into the driving seat. Reading his account, I realised that the oil metaphor allows Google and Facebook data scientists to become the equivalent of the oil company “Exploration and Production” geologists, battling the elements in remote and dangerous places to bring us something that powers our lives.
But this framing completely removes the individual agency that created the stuff in the first place. Oil is formed by millions of years of compression and chemical transformation... Data is created in real time, as we click and swipe around the internet. The metaphor might work in an economic sense, but it fails to describe what data is as a material. It’s not oil, it’s people.
(Image by Kickize on Flickr: CC BY-SA 2.0)
Locke acknowledges in the piece that he doesn’t have the answers yet, but his starting point is that the data metaphor therefore needs to put people at the heart of the story. All of that data represents traces of our lives and of our memories. Put like that, it immediately becomes more valuable than oil:
A metaphor that puts our personal experience at the forefront will help us find out where to draw lines in how our lives are stored and processed, and to understand that the lines will need to be different for different people... Maybe we should be very explicit, and refer to data as our lives. Imagine if a service had to ask you permission to ‘track your life’ or ‘share information about your life with other providers’. Already that feels grittier, more visceral, than just ‘data’. We urgently need to come up with metaphors like this, that bring the discussion over data down from the skies above us and locate it in the minutiae of our everyday lives.
#2: Frameworks for social change
Matthew Taylor has been an outstanding Chief Executive of the Royal Society of the Arts (disclosure: I’m a member), and in his last couple of months in the role he’s been spending his time thinking about what he calls “co-ordination theory”. Perhaps by way of a leaving present the RSA has done one of its ‘Minimate’ animations of the idea.
At its heart, it seems quite a simple idea. He argues that there are only a few models that we use to discuss how society is organised. In brief, these are Authority, Individualism, Values and Belonging, and Fatalism.
When I first watched the animation, if I’m honest, I couldn’t decide whether this was something or nothing. Having watched it through again, I think it’s a useful meta-narrative that at least lets different elements of the social sciences—which tend to have different centres of gravity around these four narratives—have conversations where they can acknowledge their different bases and can agree on where they agree and where they differ.
(Matthew Taylor argues that these differences are why social sciences are less influential than natural sciences but that’s plain wrong. The reason that natural sciences are more influential is that they represent a mode of knowing that underpins the entire Enlightenment project.)
There’s a lot more content here. Taylor’s written up his idea of co-ordination theory over at least ten extended blog posts that together probably run to monograph length by now. They’re not very well organised—not even linked together—which the RSA media team could perhaps sort out. I probably need to spend some time looking at these before I rush to judgment.
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