Data Fluency is an Antidote to Fear and Apathy
Source: Meeting of the Minds Published: April 27, 2020
One of the things I’ve noticed during this current moment of sheltering-in-place is the barrage of data permeating my news feeds and daily conversations. Every morning, the lead item on my daily doom scroll is a map of confirmed cases, death tolls, and lately, mercifully; recovered patients (all examples of data). In the U.S., urban communities of color are hot zones, drawing new attention to long-standing community inequity (data). Unemployment is skyrocketing (data), and small businesses are struggling (data). Population (data) is necessary to calculate the rate of spread, and apparently, so might be sewage surveillance (biological data). Political, economic, and civic discourse highlights the conditions (data) that must be in place to begin reentry. Countries that have been successful flattening their curves (data visualization) have been conducting mass tests and contact tracing with various privacy implications (data collection and personally identifiable information/PII). Medical staff are sharing information about potential treatments like proning that seem to help (anecdotal, best practice data).
Most of us are quite literally up to our eyeballs in data. Now is the perfect time to improve our data fluency.
Several years ago, I was working on a research project with a community of data security professionals (think CIA, FBI, etc.). I often include an ice breaker question to establish rapport. This time, when I asked the question, “what keeps you up at night?” They told me that, because of what they did for a living, they were worried about society at large. They talked about how uninformed and careless most people were about their data; that people couldn’t see what was happening around them. They were worried. They were bring it up with other parents at the soccer game worried.
Society is increasingly, and often invisibly, influenced by data. “We’re shedding data just by virtue of being alive,” according to The Future Today Institute. Yet, most of us are not keeping up with the pace of this digitalization of our lives. How do we ensure responsible use of our digital assets—like our health care information, our voter registration records, our Google searches, and our credit card purchase history? How do we learn to recognize when we’re being nudged?