What is data; Historical vertigo; The past

Hello from Paris!

I was listening to a podcast this week with writer / director / producer / comedian Judd Apatow, and he said something which has been looping around my brain:

I don’t know why, but it stuck and provides me at least with some rationale to help understand other people.

We may find that when people act in a way that baffles us, there’s logic somewhere. Let’s say your colleague rejects your ideas – this might be a fair enough reason to call them out as poor collaborators, but maaaaybe in the past they were micro-managed to the point of exhaustion?

Opening up the conversation and asking whether there’s anything you can do to reassure that person about your relationship is a sure-fire way to improve things for both of you.

As usual, communication is the remedy for a lot more than we give credit for.

It’s a funny statement, because it’s annoyingly true. We talk about “data” as being this overarching force that dominates everything, but it’s way more siloed than that. Data to run a bus network is not the same data that links tweets to targeted adverts. It’s this nuance which fails the word, and interestingly data is actually more often than not about the people on the other side of your actions, rather than you as an individual. What? Well, when you like my tweet, that forms the data point/s, not necessarily me posting it in the first place 🤔

“Can we return to normal?” is probably a question you’ve either heard, or asked recently. This works on the premise that 1) normal was good 2) it’s possible to pretend the past two years didn’t happen 3) someone knows how to make that happen. This article describes a “vertigo” that we’re experiencing at the promise of a future which isn’t quite the past, but much better, with freedom at every corner. The problem is that no one really knows how to get there. Culture has been shifted forever, and whatever norms we thought we had are off-tilt. If the now can’t be defined, how do we get to whatever is next?

This is more of a listicle than I’d like, but is in depth enough to have a good read. It describes how the internet cannot and is not at any time “in the present”, with it most of the time being a reaction to something that has already happened. This makes it really hard to define when the internet is, which just broke my brain.

–

There’s no podcast this week! I’ve been actively trying to listen to my surroundings this past week, and I encourage you to as well.

Get outside for 30/40 minutes and listen to what’s around, it’ll be great I promise.