Flashback: The Data Age

It's time to write a fond epitaph for the Information Age. Like it or not, we've entered the Data Age, the era in which we recognize that a glut of information doesn't make us smart, just like buying a dictionary doesn't make us Shakespeare.

Scientists Fred Holland and Paul Sandifer use the term in their work at the Hollings Marine Lab on James Island. They live in a world saturated by data — more pieces of information than the logical human mind could ever order, arrange or imagine.

Want to understand what is happening to the Lowcountry shrimp harvest? Have at it. Thanks to modern technology, we have easy access to everything from satellite images to historical weather logs to digitized shrimp gene sequences.

That's what the Information Age was supposed to do: give us the scattered puzzle pieces that fit together to form The Big Picture.

But here's a more appropriate analogy: Information Age technologies have proven instead to be wildly efficient at burying us in the pieces from millions of jigsaw puzzles, all mixed up and practically indistinguishable.

This data surplus is most obvious in the world of science. Holland, the director of the Hollings Marine Lab, frames things this way: "So we have all this data. The challenge is, how do we add value to it and make sense of it?"

A dramatic example of this process comes from University of South Carolina physics professor Dave Tedeschi. In 2003, Tedeschi and a group of colleagues announced that they had found evidence confirming the discovery of an exotic new subatomic particle — not in a lab somewhere, but hiding in old data they just happened to have lying around.

It's not like the physicists were slack the first time around: The data from their particle accelerator experiments is measured in terabytes, a million million binary bits of computer information. You need a machine to recognize a pattern against that much background noise — unless you're very, very intuitive.

And at least the scientists are professionally equipped to deal with the challenges of the Data Age. The rest of us are struggling.

Example: One explanation for the increasingly harsh tone this election year is the accelerating fragmentation of political media, a potential blessing but an enormous test of society's ability to process conflicting data. Hate President Bush? Google can provide in seconds any number of Web sites that will provide you with facts to support that feeling. Hate anybody who criticizes Bush? Ditto. Just turn on the radio.

Without functional institutions equipped to integrate the complex data of 21st-century life, citizens typically wind up just picking sides. Raw data becomes a cultural Rorschach test, and what we see is generally what we expected to find in the first place.

So we're not just disagreeing — we're speaking in different languages.

The promise of the Data Age is that the truth really is in there, somewhere. But our age has a curse, too: apophenia, the tendency to see patterns that may or may not exist. As science-fiction visionary William Gibson wrote in his blog earlier this year: "Want to see the Virgin Mary on a tortilla? Look long enough."

The model of the Information Age was the computer network, but the new model looks a lot more like an old analog radio dial, searching for a signal in a vast sea of static. The future belongs to those who prove most adept at finding it.

Or hiding it.

--Originally published as "Digging for truth in the Data Age" in The Post and Courier newspaper, Charleston, SC, by Daniel Conover, on Aug. 30, 2004....

Comments

[jaz]

Aye.

There is an interesting sidebar in the new (01/07) issue of Wired in which Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, opines that the current love affair with the Internet as we know it may well go the way of the CB radio.

He cites the increasing threat of malicious code as what might eventually drive folks from open to closed systems.

The bar is on page 058, by the way.

[hue]

It's the disInformation Age.

I yearn for the days when I had to get up turn the channel on the TV, if I can get this computer off my lap.

[ben]

The cultural rorschach test and "just taking sides" arguments ring particularly true. Just read the comments sections on any blog attended to by both sides.

[Tim]

Emory Study Lights Up The Political Brain (Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election)

The Political Brain

[Janet Edens]

So, before, we had only a little information and had to rely on someone we trusted to tell us what we needed to know. Then we had plenty of information, but not much access so we relied on people we trusted to tell us what we needed to know. Now, we have access to too much information, so we need someone we trust tell us what we need to know.

Pick me! Pick me!

[Tim]

Political Memory: Keep on typing...

[Pam]

While I've been taking time off, a 2D-LC-MS has been analyzing microbial samples for us - samples of a coral bacterial pathogen that is virulent only in warmer waters. Each sample 'run' consists of a microbial culture, grown under a specific condition - and each run will generate ~8,500 peptides (with each peptide ranging in size from 400 to 4000 daltons). After running adequate replications and all of your treatment conditions - you end up with a peptide library consisting of ~120,000 peptides which you sort into genes/proteins. This is a very small study done 'on the side' - and is by no means the big data generating experiments in the lab right now.

But in the lab we have help - good computer programs and databases and with some luck bioinformatics folks as collaborators. I get lost at home, outside of work, with information overload. It's like I have a meltdown. Thank God Janet is out there!

[Anna Haynes]

One solution: Lex's Listening to the people who were right. Past performance is the best predictor of future results.