Home > Work > Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) QUOTES

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) QUOTES

1 " There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

2 " On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

3 " I'm not going to pretend that a few minutes with Wikipedia can stand in for an understanding of a culture. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

4 " By forcing people to hide, intolerance creates its own cynical logic: when a large portion of a group goes unrecognized, it only makes marginalizing the whole easier. Visibility, on the other hand, creates acceptance. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

5 " But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

6 " Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they’re demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we’re changing. All we have to do is look: "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

7 " Tonight, some thirty thousand couples will have their first date because of OkCupid. Roughly three thousand of them will end up together long-term. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them, of course, will have kids. There are children alive and pouting today, grouchy little humans refusing to put their shoes on right now, who would never have existed but for the whims of our HTML. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

8 " for anything to be made whole, the first step is to know what’s missing. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

9 " Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters—it embodies William Strunk’s famous dictum, Omit needless words, at the keystroke level. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

10 " Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

11 " He's completely correct, for as with music, as with movies, and as with a wide variety of human phenomena: a flaw is a powerful thing. Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

12 " It even has a name. It’s called WEIRD research: white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And most published social research papers are WEIRD.1 "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

13 " Everything points to the same conclusion: that Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai. This kind of in-depth analysis (lexical density, word frequency) hints at the real nature of the transformation under way. The change Twitter has wrought on language itself is nothing compared with the change it is bringing to the study of language. Twitter gives us a sense of words not only as the building blocks of thought but as a social connector, which indeed has been the purpose of language since humanity hunched its way across the Serengeti. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

14 " I don’t like the dinosaur in this graphic. It looks too fake. Use a real photo of a dinosaur instead. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

15 " Think about the progression of a young relationship. Two people meet for the first time in person. Talk, drink, get to know each other. Next, if there is a next, is the apartments. The unfamiliar number on the door, a brass handle where yours is steel. The strange but pleasant smell of another person’s sheets. Shampoos in the shower, used, but new to you. Loganberry: Okay, why not? Back at your place next time, she opens the fridge, and it’s just … mustards. Sorry. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

16 " The change Twitter has wrought on language itself is nothing compared with the change it is bringing to the study of language. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

17 " prejudice unchallenged is prejudice perpetuated. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

18 " When you see people in middle management dickering with their Fitbits in the elevator, you know the Quantified Self movement is here to stay. The "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

19 " the DOLLY Project (Digital OnLine Life and You)—it’s a searchable repository of every geotagged tweet since December 2011, "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

20 " Observers call the phenomenon Black Twitter, described here by Farhad Manjoo in Slate: Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It’s this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter. "

― Christian Rudder , Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)