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The War on Stupid
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In the midst of information overload, it's even more important for there to be collaborations between Sense-Makers and Creatives to help make sens eof the world around us. Presented at SoConn2012 in Atlanta.
Andrew DaviesFollow
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The War on Stupid
- ACCESS TO DATA INDEX
- ACCESS TO DATA INDEX SENSE-MAKING INDEX
- 1. Biological Limitations
- 2. Information Buffet
- © Desilu Productions 1951
- 3. Institutional Distrust
- STUPID ACCESS TO DATA INDEX SENSE-MAKING INDEX
- Common Side Effects Include: © Hugh Macleod | gapingvoid.com
- Common Side Effects Include: © Gregory Bull/AP © Bradley C Bower / Associated Press
- What to do? STUPID ACCESS TO DATA INDEX SENSE-MAKING INDEX
- Why Creatives ?
- Why Creatives ?
- Why Creatives ?
- FORM CONTENT
- THE FRONTLINES: Infographics © Charles Joseph Minard
- THE FRONTLINES: Infographics © Charles Joseph Minard
- THE FRONTLINES: Scribbling
- THE FRONTLINES: Comics © SmarterComics
- THE FRONTLINES: Drawing on screen © RSA Animate
- THE FRONTLINES: Drawing on screen
- THE FRONTLINES: Infographic movies
- THE FRONTLINES: Sound Design © Radiolab
- THE FRONTLINES: Sound Design © Radiolab
- © Manga No Shinbun
- Go to http://youtu.be/vU6y1DDHS24 for the Full Video
- If you want to do visual storytelling, you need people who can marry words with images, animation, video. http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/12/clara-jeffery-what-nonprofit-news-orgs-are-betting-on-for-2012/
- “More training in basic drawing skills would help with this, as would more emphasis on productive collaboration with artists and designers for more complex projects.”
- BUDGETS NEED
- What good is your data if no one can understand it?
Editor's Notes
- We are in the middle of a war.It’s less visible than the war on terror, not as much fun as the war on drugs, but it’s just as dangerousMaybe even more because we don’t even realize that we’re all in danger of being stupidLet me explain
- As you see here on our pseudo chart, the amount of info we have access to, is not letting up,But parallel to this trend, and maybe even because of it, there’s another trend happening
- It’s what we’re calling our sense-making indexIt represents the fact that we’re struggling to keep up with making sense of this information we’ve gotten access to:What’s preventing us from keeping up?We’ve isolated 3 major drivers:
- Biological limitations:- Our brains aren’t that much different from the Cro-Magnon brain, why?Evolution takes a long time, so the hardware is really out of dateSo our brains’ default settings aren’t cut out for this media rich environment we’re living in, and it comes with some bugse.g. confirmation biasBelieve “facts” that line up with what we already believe. Distrust anything that contradicts our beliefs.This worked well for us when we were roaming in tribes on the savannah, not so much now And my favorite Option paralysis:Which displays itself when we’re given too many options to choose from. Our brains can only hold a limited number of things before it get overwhelmed.. Add this to our 2nddrvier
- - Informational natural selection: when options compete, the sexiest, quickest, easiest, prevails. ***** We are quickly approaching an innumerable quantity of information sources. Any flavor you like and many without nutritional information outlining how healthy a source of fact they are, who's funding the "studies" and "research labs" they cite. Staring at the buffet of information, most people go for junk food. Sexiness over substance. And although we feel like we're better informed because we have more info; the truth is, we are able to be less analytical with the information because of the speed at which we're forced to process it. **********- e.g. look at TV news: the choice of stories as well as the complexity of the screens, the graphics are screeming for your dwindling attention.- e.g. 1st televised Prez debates (Kennedy v Nixon) visually Kennedy won, audio-wise Nixon won
- Or put another way, it’s kinda like this… we’re Lucy trying our hardest to fit it all in… but the conveyor belt’s moving too fastThe result, we end up trying stupid things to compensate
- Sense-making institutions under attack:Media, Academia, Politics(might be debatable whether politicians were ever our sense-makers)- not just being attacked by opposition, but being diluted in quality and therefore eroding trust.- so many options, hard to tell which is a good source or not- we trust our friends more than we trust other sources... but do our friends have all the intel? *****On one hand these institutions are under attack by opposition seeking to discredit them - Sarah Palin for example, using terms like "lamestream media" or not being ashamed to admit that she couldn't name a newspaper she read regularly; or creating the neologism "refudiate"
- So there’s the situation.When we have more information than we can make sense of, or have the inclination to…that’s STUPID!
- We’re already seeing the side-effects of this stupid gap:Once we can pick our own sources, our searches are automatically filtered not to mention our online interactions, then we blissfully enjoy our own personal echo chambers.And you know how we’re predisposed to confirmation bias already, this just amplifies it
- [Patrick]
- Futile trying to slow down the flow of information. So the most sensible thing to try to do is raise the Sense-Making index?
- As we’ve seen the problem isn’t access to the information, but the form that the data is in. What we’re seeing is a move to re-form the data so that it’s easier to ingest.
- This is where the Translators come in - Creatives who can take the content and package it in easily digestable forms.
- Why Creatives you ask? Since mankind knew how to scribble on walls and tell stories, creatives have been the custodians of communication, the gatekeepers of the most effective means of transmitting our important information… it’s in our ancestry, our pedigreeThere’s even some research that indicates there might be an advantage to using visuals to effectively correct misperceptionsNevermind that we mostly use our powers to sell crap nowThat just proves that we’re skilled at perception management, the FORM part of the equationBUT we suck at research (the CONTENT)
- Why Creatives you ask? Since mankind knew how to scribble on walls and tell stories, creatives have been the custodians of communication, the gatekeepers of the most effective means of transmitting our important information… it’s in our ancestry, our pedigreeThere’s even some research that indicates there might be an advantage to using visuals to effectively correct misperceptionsNevermind that we mostly use our powers to sell crap nowThat just proves that we’re skilled at perception management, the FORM part of the equationBUT we suck at research (the CONTENT)
- Why Creatives you ask? Since mankind knew how to scribble on walls and tell stories, creatives have been the custodians of communication, the gatekeepers of the most effective means of transmitting our important information… it’s in our ancestry, our pedigreeThere’s even some research that indicates there might be an advantage to using visuals to effectively correct misperceptionsNevermind that we mostly use our powers to sell crap nowThat just proves that we’re skilled at perception management, the FORM part of the equationBUT we suck at research (the CONTENT)
- That’s why we need bothThe form + content working together to make the complex simple and/or understandable.Brief explanation of Sense-Makers as more than just journos (also scientists, etc)
- And we’re already seeing this happening
- Quantitative Data viz has been around for centuriese.g. 1845 Charles Minard
- Over the past few years it’s seen a resurgence with sites like visual.ly popping up to help archive the vast amounts of info graphics there are out there.But there are other examples of creative information distillery out there:
- WoS can be fought even with primitive tools. Like scribbling on a napkinDan Roam’s scribbles boiling down the intricacies of the healthcare debate got him a call from the Gov’t to help with their communication strategies
- For naturally gifted artists, there’s the graphic novel route:[explanation of Smarter comics translation of business books into graphic novel form]
- And then taking the classic whiteboard concept a step further, we’re seeing a lot more of these animated whiteboard videos like this one from the RSA
- And then taking the whiteboard a step further, we’re seeing a lot more of these animated whiteboard videos like this one from the RSA
- Or if you’re really advanced… motion graphics.-When we were in the middle of the aftermath of the financial meltdown and being introduced to terms like Credit Default Swap and Toxic Assets, derivativesJonathan Jarvis used research & info design and created a mograph piece thatcrystalized those concepts and put them in an easy to understand contextIt became viral (thousands of hits)“Forbes.com, Reuters Financial Blog,andNPR Planet Money commented on the simplicity of the explanation and the value of its holistic approach.”
- Maybe you’re not a visual person, there’s also sound..Remember the emotion vs rational hardwiring I was talking about earlier.Here’s how radiolab explains it.Poynter encourages journos to use digital audio: http://bit.ly/xDimDg
- So since there’s already a translation movement afoot, what more is there to do?
- As more news agencies recognize the power of creative distillation, they’re also realizing how labor & time intensive it is. Currently only major news outlets can afford the time & money to experiment with this.e.g. Manga No Shimbun, a japanese newspaper that tells it’s stories in Manga form has 100 manga artists on staff
- Or have the connections to work out deals with major distribution channels like youtube.
- Add to that the “Hamsterization” of Journalists by the overwhelming info demands
- So what if there was a marketplace for smaller / local news outlets to get access to creative distillers, and for them and individual sense-makers to get their work TranslatedPLUS give ordinary designers and other creatives who don’t have access to data sets and researchers an outlet to use their powers for good (ref: Occupy Design)
- That’s what we think is missing and what we want to do with Mission Control. Provide a place where Sense-makers and Creatives can collaborate on Missions of epic sense-making
- By way of example, Patrick and Drew took a local issue of importance to Savannah, previously investigated and reported in a multi-part article series…..
- The need is out there and people are recognizing it
- MoJo co-editor Clara Jeffery, in an article for the Nieman Journalism Lab, said that marrying their stories with digital media was going to be a focus for them in 2012 and should be for all journalists.
- Likewise scientists are seeing the need for distillation help. In the spring of this year a book geared towards teaching scientists how to better visually communicate their ideas is coming out Because, as one of the authors said in an interview, scientists lack the design skills to properly communicate clearly, And even then he suggested the need for collaboration between them and designers
- But Newsrooms and editorial budgets are shrinking, so not only do they need more journos, but they have an ever growing need for creatives, coders and developers just to keep up with tech: http://to.pbs.org/xUOXKE - but by creating partnerships that enable media outlets to distribute information in new ways; adapting it for the mobile/digital age.
- While tech like Read It Later or Instapaper and aggregating sites like Longform.org have enabled fans of longform writing to access them with ease, studies of those sites shows that most people save short content or videos, not longform, and if they do save lengthy pieces, very few ever get back to it: http://bit.ly/AgxuxT
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