Book Report on "Numerati Baker, Stephen. (2008). The Numerati. Boston"

Book Report 4 pages (1264 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Numerati

Baker, Stephen. (2008). The numerati. Boston: Mariner Books.

Big Brother is watching you: in cyberspace as you Google, at the grocery store when you swipe your loyalty card for a discount on toilet paper, and even at the doctor's office, where we are given sensors to 'spy' on ourselves and our loved ones to make sure we do not forget critical health data between appointments (Baker, 2008, p. 154-156). Our lives are increasingly data-driven, and our privacy is being increasingly violated -- for the good of marketers, and for our own good. This is the central contention of Stephen Barker's book the numerati.

Once upon a time, people were terrified that big government would accumulate massive stores of information on the lives of citizens. Now individuals are ceding such information willingly, sometimes unwittingly, to large corporations as well as to other massive, faceless bureaucracies Canny marketers study what web surfers buy, what types of news sites they prefer (liberal or conservative), and what type of ads appeal to specific demographic groups. The amount of data that is available about what a consumer wants is seemingly endless.

What is so insidious about this trend is that some of it appears to be helpful to consumers, so there is little resistance. Shoppers are seduced into using loyalty or rewards cards for small discounts, which enables stores to keep track of consumer purchases and to do free market research for the store. Consumers with similar buying habits are demographically 'matched' so that they can be targeted with suitable advertising. For example, Democratic cat lovers who are concerned about the environment and buy organic produce can be the recipients of one type of advertising, while Republican gun owners who buy fast food can be the recipient of another (Baker 2008, p.84). Perhaps the most beneficial use of such data from a consumer perspective is manifested in the tracking medical patient's vital signs, through heart monitors and blood pressure machines. The data can be transmitted to doctors and nurses in their offices. But even this practice may have a potentially negative consequence: what if the data is wrong? What if this information is used to entirely to supplant human contact? What if the data gets into the wrong hands and is used to deny someone adequate healthcare?

The promise of the ability to track numbers in such a specific fashion is that it will improve our lives by making medicine, shopping, and news information more personalized. But such obsessive monitoring and cataloging of data also has the potential to make things more impersonal, reducing human beings to numbers. As a result patients might lose higher-quality care, even any kind of healthcare at all, because their data is used to speak for the sum of their entire humanity and health. Rampant market segmentation also can make us less cohesive as a society, as we receive differently-positioned campaign advertisements, coupons, and even medical care.

The title of Baker's book refers to the mathematicians responsible for 'crunching' the data collected by machines, the numerati who try to make such private data meaningful. A skilled numerati "can trace the patterns of our migrations, as if we were swallows or humpback whales, while we move from site to site….[or] become intrigued by the people who click most often on an ad for car rentals. [in one example] among them, the largest group had paid a visit to online obituary listings. That makes sense… 'Someone dies, so you fly to the funeral and rent a car'" (Baker, 2008, p.1).

Some correlations between data-driven behaviors seem less explicable than this obituary-car example, such as the strange pattern of romantic movie lovers who also surfed rental car websites. But a possible theory can be tested for this unexpected trend: "A broader trend, a correlation… READ MORE

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