The strange thing about data is that they don’t speak themselves. They need to be embedded into an interpretation to become palatable and understandable. This interpretation may be an analytic account like the narrative synthesis told after performing a regression. It also may be a story in a more conventional sense, something like a success story of conquest, mastery, submission, or revelation which results out of the usual storytelling used in marketing.
The funny thing about data and stories is that it is easier to create a story out of data than extracting data out of a story told. It is easy to conceived of narratives built on top of data. Companies like Narrative Science create market reports or sporting reports automatically out of the data they receive on a daily basis. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine to extract statistical data about a soccer game out of the up-to-the-minute scores of the same game presented on a website.
But data form a peculiar basis of stories. Think of the data which are collected when you visit a website – a typical basis of Big Data. These websites collect data on where you go, where you click, how long you stay there and so on; typically, they are behavioural data. What data scientist can get out of that are correlations; these data don’t allow to grasp the causal mechanisms behind the observed behaviour. They are not able to see the whole person behind the behaviour; thus they are e.g. not able to tell what the costumers feel during their visit on the website, why they reacted – and where the visitors see value in the offers they are presented. It is thus a reduction of the perspective which comes along with stories based on data, a reduction which maybe can’t be avoided since data are in themselves a product in a process of estrangement typical for capitalism. The narrative might attenuate or conceal the limitations of the data, but it will not be able to reach far beyond the restrictions imposed.
But there is more about data presented in narratives than a mere reduction of perspective: Other than data collected in scientific disciplines like psychology and anthropology, which might enable representative statements about population groups, the results of Big Data analyses grant a shift in perspective. By performing classifications, groupings of people according to their preferences, assessing the creditworthiness of customers, etc., Big Data allow to view human beings from the perspective of a market. And in their ability to shape the offers presented on a website in real-time and adapt the pricing mechanisms according to the IP-address from where the websites are being accessed; in their ability to build up systems of gratification, rewarding actions of the users which are seen as opportune by the infrastructure, data grant a point of view onto customers which further strengthen commodification and economic governance. The fact that this point of view is equivalent to the perspective of the market becomes especially visible in the narratives accompanying these data.
kplex-project.com 