#dataclysm

It's a social scientist's curse- what you want to get at is exactly what your subjects are most eager to hide.

But the advent of social media has changed the calculus in a couple ways. First, it gives us metrics- follower counts, retweet counts, favorites counts- to judge our status. Be the first to spread the news, get more retweets. Say something especially cutting, and your followers applaud your wit. The social capital you build by sharing information is now explicit; in fact, it's in little numbers that increment before your very eyes.

OkCupid shows you little counts of your messages, your visitors, your possibilities. We know that those numbers keep our users interested, especially when they go up. Without little bits of excitement, a webpage of an app seems dead and people drift off.

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. From the high-flown language of literary fiction to the simple, even misspelled, status update, through all this writing runs a common purpose. Whether friend to friends, stranger to stranger, lover to lover or author to reader, we use words to connect. And as long as there is a person bored, excited, enraged, transported, in love, curious or missing his home and afraid for his future, he'll be writing about it.

I´m pulling from the undifferentiated whole. We focis on the dense clusters, the centers of mass, the data duplicated over and over by the repetition and commonality of our human experience. It´s science as pointillism. Those dots may be one fractional part of you, but the whole is us.

What you choose to notice, remember, and transcribe is as much a matter of how you look as what´s actually there. In social science, knowledge, like water, often takes the shape of it´s vessel.