Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
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“How to Be Black Online,” a slideshow by Baratunde Thurston, is a clever overview of Black Twitter and acknowledges better than most sources that, like many racial tropes, “Black Twitter” is both “funny because it’s true” and inaccurate at the same time. See slideshare.net/baratunde/how-to-be-black-online-by-baratunde.
Hard data on Twitter usage by ethnicity can be found in the Pew Research report “Demographics of Key Social Networking Platforms” (2013), by Maeve Duggan and Aaron Smith: pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms/.
For evidence of white confusion over Black Twitter, see Nick Douglas, “Micah’s ‘Black People on Twitter’ Theory,” Too Much Nick, August 21, 2009, toomuchnick.com/post/168222309/.
Right now there are 2,643 The site Social Bakers ranks all Twitter accounts by number of followers. The number has, no doubt, changed. Visit socialbakers.com/twitter/ and page back through the rankings to see for yourself. For information on US taxpayers by income, visit the IRS’s “SOI Tax Stats—Individual Statistical Tables by Filing Status” page at irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats---Individual-Statistical-Tables-by-Filing-Status. Information on the Forbes Billionaires list is from Elizabeth Barber, “Forbes’ Richest People: Number of Billionaires up Significantly,” Christian Science Monitor, March 3, 2014, csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2014/0303/Forbes-richest-people-number-of-billionaires-up-significantly-video.
Newt Gingrich boasted See Jeff Neumann, “Newt Gingrich Brags About His Twitter Followers,” Gawker, August 1, 2011, gawker.com/5826477/. Also see John Cook, “Update: Only 92% of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Are Fake,” Gawker, August 2, 2011, gawker.com/5826960/.
Mitt Romney See “Is Mitt Romney Buying Twitter Followers?” by Zach Green on 140elect: 140elect.com/twitter-politics/is-mitt-romney-buying-twitter-followers/. My data and chart are adapted from the data and chart in that post.
“We, the users” See Jenna Wortham, “Valley of the Blahs: How Justin Bieber’s Troubles Exposed Twitter’s Achilles’ Heel,” New York Times Bits blog, January 25, 2014, bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/valley-of-the-blahs-how-justin-biebers-downfall-exposed-twitters-achilles-heel/.
In 2012, Salesforce.com My discussion of Salesforce’s job post draws on the following sources:
Drew Olanoff, “Klout Would Like Potential Employers to Consider Your Score Before Hiring You. And That’s Stupid,” TechCrunch, September 29, 2012, techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/klout-would-like-potential-employers-to-consider-your-score-before-hiring-you-and-thats-stupid/.
Jessica Roy, “Want to Work at Salesforce? Better Have a Klout Score of 35 or Higher,” BetaBeat, September 27, 2012, betabeat.com/2012/09/you-may-not-work-at-salesforce-unless-you-have-a-klout-score-of-35-or-higher/.
The original job posting was still active when I was writing, but has since been removed.
The gates open and close See Larry Wissel, “How Does a Logic Gate in a Microchip Work? A Gate Seems Like a Device That Must Swing Open and Closed, Yet Microchips Are Etched onto Silicon Wafers That Have No Moving Parts. So How Can the Gate Open and Close?” Scientific American, “Ask the Experts,” October 21, 1999, scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-a-logic-gate-in/.
The gates on a microchip aren’t doors in the traditional sense, swinging on tiny hinges. They use voltage to control movement, whereas an old gate might use wooden slats. But they, like gates, control flow from one space to another, and are either open or shut.
Target, by analyzing a customer’s purchases See Kashmir Hill, “How Target Figured Out a Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did,” Forbes, February 16, 2012, forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/.
a Jell-O marketing campaign The Jell-O discussion and illustrative tweets are drawn from Harry Bradford, “Jell-O’s Fun My Life Twitter Campaign: Social Media Genius or Just ‘Funning’ Annoying?” Huffington Post, May 24, 2013, huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/24/jello-fun-my-life-twitter_n_3332230.html.
McDonald’s sent out Drawn from Hannah Roberts, “#McFail! McDonalds’ Twitter Promotion Backfires as Users Hijack #Mcdstories Hashtag to Share Fast Food Horror Stories,” Daily Mail, January 24, 2012, dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090862/.
Wendy’s had tried Drawn from “When Twitter Hashtag Promotion Marketing Goes Bad #HeresTheBeef” by blogger “stacie,” on the Divine Miss Mommy blog: thedivinemissmommy.com/when-twitter-hashtag-promotion-marketing-goes-bad-heresthebeef/.
More recently, Mountain Dew See Everett Rosenfeld, “Mountain Dew’s ‘Dub the Dew’ Online Poll Goes Horribly Wrong,” Time, August 14, 2012, newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/14/mountain-dews-dub-the-dew-online-poll-goes-horribly-wrong/.
Chapter 14: Breadcrumbs
As of May 2013, Facebook was recording See Craig Smith, “By the Numbers: 98 Amazing Facebook Stats,” Digital Marketing Ramblings, March 13, 2014, expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/#.U1AArPldXko.
a group from the UK This passage and the table are based on “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” by Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5805.
Xbox One See Stephen Fairclough, “Physiological Data Must Remain Confidential,” Nature 505, no. 7483 (2014): 263.
The UK has 5.9 million See David Barrett, “One Surveillance Camera for Every 11 People in Britain, Says CCTV Survey,” Telegraph, July 10, 2013, telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/.
In Manhattan See Brian Palmer, “Big Apple Is Watching You,” Slate, May 3, 2010, slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/05/big_apple_is_watching_you.html.
All those security cameras See Jon Healey, “Surveillance Cameras and the Boston Marathon Bombing,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2013, articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/17/news/la-ol-boston-bombing-surveillance-suspects-20130417.
See also “The Need for Closed Circuit Television in Mass Transit,” by Michael Greenberger, University of Maryland Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2006–15, Law Enforcement Executive Forum (2006): 151, digital commons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontentcgi?article=1065&context=fac_pubs.
“master the Internet” This phrase in particular refers to the NSA’s cooperation with the surveillance apparatuses of other governments, as part of the “Five Eyes” Alliance. See Wikipedia’s “Mastering the internet” entry. The slide depicted was widely circulated after its publication by the Guardian. See theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document.
“For each of the millions” See David Medine et al., “Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (2014), http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pclob-215.pdf.
Women are using apps My discussion of menstruation apps is based on Jenna Wortham, “Our Bodies, Our Apps: For the Love of Period-Trackers,” New York Times, January 23, 2014.
there’s a startup that says it can infer This fact is from Jaron Lanier, “How Should We Think About Privacy?” Scientific American, November 2013, 65–71.
all the analysis was done anonymously and in aggregate It bears repeating that at no time was any data tied back to any individual. For the user photos and text cited in the book see the notes above related to them.
Jaron Lanier My discussion of Lanier’s work focuses on his article “How Should We Think About Privacy?”
“Using data drawn from queries” See John Markoff, “Unreported Side Effects of Drugs Are Found Using Internet Search Data, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 7, 2013, nytimes.com/2013/03/07/science/unreported-side-effects-of-drugs-found-using-internet-data-study-finds.html.
a crowdsourced family tree Geni.com reports more than 75 million entries in its tree. They’re owned by MyHeritage, which claims 1.5 billion.
two political scientists debunked
See Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, “Don’t Blame the Maps,” New York Times, January 26, 2014, nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-geography-stupid.html.
Facebook was collecting 500 terabytes See Eliza Kern, “Facebook Is Collecting Your Data—500 Terabytes a Day,” Gigaom, August 22, 2012, gigaom.com/2012/08/22/facebook-is-collecting-your-data-500-terabytes-a-day/.
Alex Pentland at MIT My discussion of Pentland draws on his article “Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data,” in Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009, ed. Soumitra Dutta and Irene Mia (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2009), 75–80, and an interview with him, “An Interview with Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland About ‘Social Physics’ ” by IDcubed: idcubed.org/?post_type=home_page_feature&p=880.
The Washington Post captures the shortfall See “Million Mask March descends on Washington” on the Washington Post’s PostTV blog: http://wapo.st/1b5Kt5J.
Coda
Tufte’s books The discussion of the Vietnam Memorial, and the quote I use, are from Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006), but Tufte’s Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990) and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001) were also indispensible.
The memorial was digitized in 2008 See fold3.com/thewall and Mallory Simon, “Vets Pay Tribute to Fallen Comrades at Virtual Vietnam Wall,” CNN.com, April 1, 2008, cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/01/vietnam.wall/.
Two pictures had been added to his entry PFC Wilson’s profile on fold3 is at fold3.com/page/631972608_lorne_john_wilson/stories/. It is unclear if he is personally depicted in the group picture. It’s clearly an authentic snapshot from the Vietnam War, but it is blurry.
Acknowledgments
Like pages without binding, this project and indeed my life would’ve flown to the winds long ago without my wife, Reshma. Thank you for your unwavering support, selflessness, and love.
Thank you to Max Krohn, Sam Yagan, and Chris Coyne for building OkCupid and for having me along. It has been a privilege to work with and for you guys for the last fifteen years.
Thank you to my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who turned Dataclysm from a rambling pitch at a bar into a bonafide proposal, and to Amanda Cook, my editor at Crown, who took it from there. To the extent this book is a success, her patience and skill have made mere ideas into something worth reading. Thank you also to Emma Berry, editorial assistant, and to the design team, especially Chris Brand, for bringing Dataclysm into being, and to Annsley Rosner, Sarah Breivogel, Sarah Pekdemir, and Jay Sones for helping it out into the world. The support and vision of Molly Stern, Jacob Lewis, and David Drake made all of the above possible. Thank you, too, to Allison Lorentzen at Penguin for her very early guidance into the publishing world.
Thank you to James Dowdell, my versatile data researcher and programmer. James did the essential database work behind Dataclysm and also generated many of the book’s maps and network plots. Thank you to Tom Quisel and Mike Maxim for pulling (and repulling!) data from OkCupid, and for being excellent sounding boards for my various statistical ideas.
Thank you to my parents and my sister for their encouragement and for being the foundation of my life. Thank you to the Patel family for supporting me and, especially, Reshma, while we bent our days and weeks and months around getting this book finished.
Thank you to Eddie Lou at Shiftgig, Tim Abraham at StumbleUpon (and now Twitter), Ryan Ogle and Sean Rad at Tinder, Jim Talbot at Match, Tom Jacques at Datehookup, and Erik Martin at Reddit for aggregated data and access. Thank you to Michael Tapper and Ben Murray for reading drafts, and to Sean Mathey at Mathey & Tree, Eric Brown at Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, and John Therien at Smith Anderson for legal work. Thank you to Doug Demay for advice that was no less wise for being informal. Finally, thank you to Jed McCaleb and Justin Rice, who, from d20s to bitcoin to Dylan to Ulysses, have taught me so much. My life and this book are much richer for your friendship.
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Abrams, J. J.
abstractions, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 12.1
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Africa, 9.1, 9.2n, 9.3, 12.1
African Americans, 12.1, nts.1
jokes about, 8.1n, 8.2, 9.1
as political candidates, 8.1, 8.2
on Twitter, 13.1, nts.1
see also racism
aging
AIDS, 9.1, 9.2
algorithms, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1n, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3
Ali, Muhammad, 8.1, nts.1
Amazon, itr.1, bm2.1, nts.1
American Institute of Public Opinion
American Political Science Association (APSA)
Anderson, Benedict, 12.1, nts.1
Anderson, Pamela
Anonymous collective
anorexia
Apple, 3.1, 14.1
apps, itr.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1
Arab Spring, n
Aristotle, 10.1, nts.1
Arizona State University, 3.1, nts.1
Asians, itr.1, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1
atheism, 5.1, 7.1
attractiveness, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, nts.1, nts.2
aging and
disparities in, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
jobs and, 7.1, 7.2
of men to women, 1.1, 2.1, 5.1, 6.1
race and, 6.1, 6.2
satisfaction and, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
sex and, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, bm2.1
of women to men, 1.1, 5.1
Atwater, Lee, 8.1, nts.1
Backstrom, Lars, 4.1, nts.1, nts.2
ballads, 3.1, 10.1
Ballou, Sullivan, 3.1, 3.2, nts.1, nts.2
Bass Ale, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1
Baywatch (TV series), 6.1, nts.1
Beatles, 10.1, 13.1
beauty, itr.1, 1.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1n
definition of, 2.1, nts.1
divisiveness of, itr.1, 7.1
effects of
imperfection and, 2.1, 2.2
Beauty Myth, The (Wolf)
behavior research
Big Data, itr.1, itr.2, 6.1
Big Lead, The (blog)
biology:
evolutionary
marine, 9.1, nts.1
bisexuality, itr.1, 11.1n, nts.1
male vs. female, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3
message exchanges and, 11.1, 11.2
vocabulary typical of, 11.1
Bisexual Resource Center
blindness, 6.1, nts.1
blogs, itr.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 13.1, bm2.1
body-image
Blumenbach, Johann
books, 3.1n, 3.2, 8.1, 12.1
Boston, Mass., 6.1, 11.1
Boston Globe, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, nts.1, nts.2, nts.3
Boston Marathon bombing, 14.1, nts.1
Bradley effect, 8.1, nts.1
brain, itr.1, 2.1, 7.1
Brand Called You, The (Montoya)
“Brand Called You, The” (Peters)
brands, 9.1, 13.1, nts.1
personal, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1
product, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1, nts.2
Breitbart, Andrew
British Trademark Registration Act
Bujalski, Andrew
Burns, Ken
BuzzFeed, 9.1, nts.1
calculus, 4.1, 9.1
California, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3
cancer
Carnegie, Andrew
Carnegie, Dale, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1
Carver, Raymond
celebrities, 9.1, 11.1, 13.1, 14.1
gay
Census, US, 1.1, 10.1, nts.1, nts.2
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
Chicago, Ill., 8.1, 12.1, 12.2
children, itr.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, bm2.1
birth of
raising of, 1.1, 2.1, 7.1
teenage, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1
Christianity, 7.1, 13.1
Chungking Express (film)
Civil War, The (TV series)
Civil War, US, 3.1, 3.2
Clinton, Hillary Rodham
Clovis people
Coldest Winter Ever, The (Sister Souljah)
Columbia University
communication, 3.1, 5.1, 9.1, 13.1, 14.1
connections fostered by, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 13.1
identifying sources of
momentous changes in, 3.1, 3.2
communities, itr.1, 12.1, 13.1
movement of
virtual
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
computers, itr.1, itr.2, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1, 13.1
cookies on
hard drives on
laptop, itr.1, 13.1
limitations of
science of, 4.1, 13.1, 14.1
sitting at
software for, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, 12.1, 14.1, 14.2
storage of data on, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 14.1
use of mouse with
Condor, 9.1, 9.2
Congress, US, 9.1, 12.1
approval ratings of, itr.1, nts.1
see also House of Representatives, US
Constitute project
conversation, itr.1, 4.1, 7.1, 8.1
in-depth
on-line, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4
on race
Cornell University, 11.1, 12.1
Craigslist, itr.1, 12.1, nts.1
maps of, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3
“Missed Connections” section on, 12.1, 12.2
Crawford, Cindy
Crick, Francis
criminal justice system, 6.1, 7.1
black vs. white defendants in, 6.1, 8.1
Cronkite, Walter
cross dressing
Cuban Missile Crisis
culturomics, 3.1, 3.2n
curves, itr.1, itr.2, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, bm2.1, nts.1
bell
beta, itr.1, nts.1
customer relations management (CRM)
customers
contradictory behavior of