Christian Rudder's Dataclysm: Who We Are (When No One's Looking) looks at important questions about the modern experience of life -- particularly the lives we live online, and what that data might say about us.The resulting global cloud of informational cruft, Rudder says, makes possible a completely new way to do social science -- to figure out, as he puts it in his subtitle, "who we are". Yes, computers don't understand humans very well. But they have their own advantages. They can see things whole that human eyes can handle only in part. Keeping track is their only job. They don't lose the scrapbook, or travel, or get drunk, or grow senile, or even blink. They just sit there and remember.
That's great if you're a scientist or a monetizer of data trails. But the humans under study might quail a little to know, for instance, that OkCupid keeps track not only of what messages you send to your potential dates, but of the characters you type and then erase while you compose your little satchels of intriguingness. A beautiful scatterplot (the book is absolutely loaded with beautiful scatterplots) maps the messaging landscape. On one side of the plot you find the careful revisers, who draft and delete, draft and delete, typing many more characters than they eventually send. On the other side are those messagers who type fewer characters than they send. How is this possible? Because these are the copypasters, the diligent dates who see romantic approach as an opportunity for digital-age efficiency, sending identical "Hi there" blurbs to dozens of potential mates. It's courtship in the age of mechanical reproduction.
The most thought-provoking parts of the book, though, deal with race. Rudder provides lists of phrases that are strongly preferred, or dispreferred, by whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians in their OkCupid profiles. The lists are full of curiosities. Asian men are strongly inclined to put "tall for an Asian" in their profiles, in keeping with stereotypes about short stature being a dating liability for men. But Asian women also have "tall for an Asian" on their list of most-used phrases -- why?
Because, Rudder maintains, singles ask all the wrong questions.
Make no doubt about it, there's much here to question. But that's only because Rudder has given us a book that makes us ask lots of questions. And it's clear: Those questions are ultimately questions about "who we are".
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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.