“Don’t Know Much” — Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville
We live in world obsessed with knowing more about everything. But we’ve forgotten that how we feel is much more important than what we know.
The tech giants are obsessed with tracking every moment we’re online and selling our data so marketers can sell us more stuff. Yet I don’t know anyone who thinks marketing has got better after 20 years of marketers collecting more and more data. We know more than we ever did. Consumers feel less cared about than ever.
24 hour rolling news channels spend literally 24 hours a day telling us things they think we should know, all the while stoking outrage in order to attract more viewers and thereby more advertising dollars. They make sure we know more about more subjects than we ever did before. Yet society is more fractured than it has ever been.
Politicians talk about being “lead by science” or “data-driven” in their decisions. What they really mean is when some piece of science or data could conceivably provide a justification, however sketchy, for what they wanted to do anyway, they cite that in evidence. And when the science or the data doesn’t serve their purpose they ignore it or make something up. There is more science and data being cited by politicians than ever before, but we’ve probably never trusted our political leaders less.
