The Ghost in the Machine
I have just finished watching a BBC Four documentary on the Art of Gothic. I’m sat on a train back from London after a week working with Energy Saving Trust, deep in one of their Cognos models.
The documentary was fascinating, relating the development of technology, war and architecture with the progression of Gothic Art, literature and film. The presenter, Andrew Graham-Dixon took in Karl Marx and Joseph Conrad; contrasted William Morris the designer / social revolutionary and William Morris the car maker; and he compared the works of infamous Irishmen, Bram Stoker and Francis Bacon. This last resonated strongly as I’d been stood in the Tate this week, mesmerised and appalled at once by the same Bacon triptych Graham-Dixon used to illuminate one point.
At the conclusion of the programme, Graham-Dixon said something that made me think.
“I had not thought that Google had undone so many.”
He was talking about the disconnection that technology brings; that same disconnection that Gothic art brings, with its tales of ghosts and images of spirits. Once we enter the realm of the macabre, we leave our own world behind, however briefly. (Ironically, I was watching him on an iPlayer download sat in a crowded train carriage, exactly the disconnect he spoke about.)
But is that true? Are we undone by technology?
Graham-Dixon’s point was, I think, that technology is at once connecting us with a reality we would not otherwise see, whilst simultaneously taking us away from our surroundings. Connecting with photos, or voices, or words of others who are not with us takes us away from our immediate world and into another realm, where ghosts can live on in machines. When we hear a recording of TS Eliot reading The Wasteland, he’s a ghost.
Is that necessarily the case? Do we have to disconnect in order to make a connection elsewhere?
This week I’ve seen how EST mine their data, how they gain otherwise unobtainable insights using technology. To do that, I had to immerse myself in their systems and their data. But I didn’t disconnect. I couldn’t I had to take the real world with me.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that we have to connect more to get there. We have to understand more about the world, about business, about people to be able to do that. If not, why would we ask the questions in the first place?
With the advent of Big Data, the possibilities are even greater. But with that widening of scope comes a greater chance of missing the point entirely.
So we rely even more on our ability to understand our clients and both their business and the world we inhabit. Without that understanding we would be merely stabbing in the dark. With it we can narrow our fields of reference much more closely – we think there may be some causal link between outcomes or we have an intuition that a comparison between results may offer a telling insight, so we aim our analytics in the relevant area.
That ability only becomes possible if we have a real connection, not only with our clients, but also the world we live in.
We don’t work in an environment that is disconnected. It may be data, a bunch of 1s and 0s and nothing more, and it is essentially un-connected to anything, being only data. But it has to be connected – it came from something, so it is intrinsically part of its source.
And in that is where our connection lies. We could add up figures & find correlations for ever more, but that would be useless if there was no real meaning to the results. And you can’t join the dots if you don’t know where the dots are in the first place.
Perhaps Graham-Dixon is right; social media and new communications technology do in essence disconnect us from reality in the same way that Gothic art does – it shows us something that is not really there at the expense of reality.
In our field though, data mining and analytics, technology can only connect us with the answer if we are simultaneously in the here and now and also the unknown.
We can find only the ghosts in the machine precisely because we don’t disconnect from our reality.