It is not an accident that maps are the vehicle for this particular b*llsh%t. I had a similar experience recently that might provide some context.
The Washington Post website, like the Atlantic, Salon and other US web heavyweights are in the business of attracting clicks: instant attention to an easily understood “interesting factoid”. The most magnetic of these are those that are salacious (Miley Cyrus), or gruesome (the war in Syria, perhaps), or some factoid that gives dramatic confirmation or contradiction of “conventional wisdom”. If scandalous or horrifying photographs are the best tool for the first of these, maps — or the newly invented “Infographics” — are the best tools for instantly communicating some “believe it or not” headline. Mapped data is invariably numerical data graphed to an image of the planet, subdivided by nation states. The subdivisions used will themselves reinforce certain assumptions; unchallenged nonsense that says the important divisions between people are state borders, not classes, communities, etc., and that people on one side should all be pretty much the same and pretty much different from everyone on the other side of that artificial line. Most anything unexpected can be placed here and will elicit an “I assumed this all along” reaction from the reader. People in Canada have more Dogs than we do? That makes sense because it’s cold. Or they want to be more like the Inuit. Or Canadians like strict hierarchies. Or some other b*llsh%t.
You mention this observation over coffee the next day at work and you sound erudite, you silently classify the writer as someone who helps the world make sense, and the Washington Post has a reliable producer of advertising views.
That’s why these sort of articles a written. But what’s the source of the particular subjects which end up in the “interesting factoid” bin? Who’s discovering these “data points” harvested by the popular columnist? This is where — to me — this gets interesting.
I looked closely at another of these “surprising map” articles a couple of months ago “Mapped: What every protest in the last 34 years looks like.” in Foreign Policy magazine, which was then picked up by dozens of websites. It worked really well, because it confirmed Western fears of a world of increasing danger, and it also was big among the US left, because it confirmed their hope of a world of increasing resistance. Except it was fatally flawed nonsense.
The source of the data was the more interesting bit: it came from a grad student working for professors who put together the Texas based “Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (#GDELT)”, a database of “events” everywhere in the world since 1979, culled from newswires and then classified with “codified emotional and thematic indicators”. So an event might be tagged as involving “a Muslim student dissident” as “XXXOPPMOSEDU” who
“Engaged in material cooperation, not specified below” as code “060″ with “the O’odua Peoples Congress (a Yoruba rebel group)” as “NGAYRBREB” at a particular geocode in Nigeria at a particular time.
So why would people want to keep that information? Well it turns out that GDELT is an open source alternative to the pre-existing classified database from the US Department of Defense called the “ICEWS”. The US DOD Worldwide Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (W-ICEWS), designed originally by DARPA, and more recently expanded by Lockheed Martin Corporation.
The three academics behind the GDELT are not DoD staffers, but are producing much the same thing for a similar audience, writing extensively on “disorder” and “terrorism.” One developed “a groundbreaking virtual reality rapid prototyping and design environment that was used by the University of Illinois Department of Architecture continuously for two and a half years, by the United States Army”, while another has been funded by “the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the U.S. government’s multi-agency Political Instability Task Force.”
The more you look, the more you see there is a huge industry, funded by or servicing the US government military and “Homeland Security”, the financial resources of which dwarf most university Political Science departments.
So b*llsh%t maps are propelled by something deeper: there is a surge in funding for “data” used to explain the world, specifically to explain the world to the United States military and intelligence agencies. More and more academics are party to this, and so that data is used in public research, not just secretly in the Pentagon, where post-9/11 assessments of intelligence failures and huge pressure to shift to private subcontracting have moved more of the work offsite. That public research is dashed across the internet in pres releases, mined for linkbait on “news sources”, that are now just websites with lots of pictures. To grab your eyeballs, what works better than maps? As a species of infographic, it is much more arresting than a column of numbers can ever be.
Prepare yourself, then, for more b*llsh%t.
