Thrill-a-minute hedonist that I am, I've spent the week reading Facts are Sacred, the Guardian's new book on data journalism, and The Signal and the Noise by clever clogs Nate Silver. The usual low standards of Guardian subbing are met, but ignoring that there's some interesting content. I note that the New Statesman, New Scientist and several marketing magazines have also devoted recent front covers to big data.
Nate Silver is impressive on the limitations of data; what he really advocates is an approach combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as a Bayesian method of improving one's probabilistic forecasts as the evidence changes. His advice — again, equally applicable to anyone in business, politics, communications or journalism — is to be consciously aware of your own biases if you want to overcome them and see the situation objectively. You hardly need me to add to the mountains of textbooks already written on how institutional groupthink and inertia have brought down many once-mighty companies. The challenge is to constantly apply this scepticism to your own positions.
At the risk of coming over all Blairite, there is also an open/closed distinction at work here, and the point applies as much to mindsets as datasets — and it cuts completely across traditional left/right or even liberal/conservative lines. As a recent Economist piece put it: "Our ideological sympathies are not good predictors at this point of how we feel about issues of digital privacy and electronic freedom. The fact that these issues don't have a clear ideological colouration yet is important because they are among the most crucial issues of the 21st century."
I would summarise this as the division between those whose instinct is to make information more widely available, and those whose instinct is that it should remain the preserve of responsible gatekeepers of knowledge — between:
I would summarise this as the division between those whose instinct is to make information more widely available, and those whose instinct is that it should remain the preserve of responsible gatekeepers of knowledge — between:
- insiders and campaigners exposing malpractice, and those who find it more convenient not to confront such issues
- those of us who believe a free society must protect the right to get things wrong if we want to get anything right, and those who believe newspapers should only publish stories approved by committees of self-appointed guardians of truth and decency
- those of us who value freedoms over feelings, and those who think that their right not to be offended trumps everyone else's right to think, investigate, publish and leak without fear
We could list more examples, but the point is that this battle against banal illiberalism will define the era of big data and big brothers. Those of us working in communications are at the frontline, so we might as well get ourselves on the right side. If you're a journalist: understand how data can be used both to find and to illustrate stories, carefully craft and submit FOIs,1 resist the lure of churnalism; if you're in PR or marketing, convince your bosses to make openness and clarity an integral part of your brand, develop a responsive social media presence that makes this a reality, and never let the cover-up eclipse the crime.
As YouGov's Peter Kellner says: "knowledge is not only preferable to ignorance in principle; it also makes for a healthier society in practice". Encouragingly, one of the 10 design principles on the new gov.uk site is: "Make things open: it makes things better." What we really need is for this message to filter up to ministers and senior civil servants, and down to middle managers.
The point isn't that we need to be anti-capitalist or anti-government in principle; just that, to make both of these essential parts of our society work better, we need to keep a close eye on them from inside and out. As citizens we have to hold public bodies and global companies to account every bit as ruthlessly as we hold producers to account when we choose whether or not to buy their goods and services. As employees we need to fight institutional cultures that prioritise the organisation above the consumer or the public.
Erring on the side of this openness is good for society; whether it's good for individuals is an entirely different question.
1 I recently did this in my capacity as an elected member of Dowanhill, Hyndland and Kelvinside Community Council, and after waiting nearly a month was told by Glasgow City Council I'd need to pay a fee of £90 to get the answer I was looking for. But don't let that put you off. ;-)↩
