Founder of OK Cupid, Christian Rudder, reveals the myriad and
mind-blowing possibilities of harnessing big data, and explores what our
digital footprints can tell us about human relationships. In an hour,
ten million pictures go up on Facebook. Each day, more people flirt on
OkCupid than live in Chicago. We've all heard these types of numbers
before; but in ‘Datacysm', for the first time, we can actually feel
their impact. We can see the actual information being created and what
we can learn from it. Christian Rudder is one of the founders of OK
Cupid, America's biggest dating site, and so is in possession of one of
the richest interpersonal datasets in the world. In this book, he takes
data from OK Cupid, and also from other sites – Twitter, Facebook,
Pinterest, Tumblr, last.fm, LinkedIn, Uber, Reddit, and so on – all the
messaging, the flirting, the posting, the trolling, the liking, the
hating, and makes something wonderful.
While most popular nonfiction
takes something small and uses it as a lens for big events, ‘Dataclysm'
does the opposite. It takes something big - the enormous dataset of
everything that we're doing and saying and thinking - and teases from it
many small things: how a joke changes in the telling, whether it really
matters where you went to college, how people decide who's beautiful
and who isn't.
This book is a series of statistical vignettes, tiny
windows, looking in on slices of life. One day soon there will be many
people whose entire lives have been mediated through their digital
devices. Then we'll really be able to see what's what. In the meantime,
with the data he has collected, Christian Rudder has forged a new genre
of statistical writing, where numbers become narrative.
Boktitel: Dataclysm: What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves Författare: Christian Rudder Bokförlag: 4th Estate
Christian Rudder
Christian Rudder is co-founder of OkCupid and now serves as chief data
analyst and author of the popular blog OkTrends. He graduated from
Harvard in 1998 with degrees in English and math, and served as creative
director for SparkNotes. His work has been written about in the New
York Times and the New Yorker, among other places. He lives in Brooklyn
with his wife and daughter.
