Her audible world was transformed by the attention she brought to it.
This leads to an valuable distinction that I think we often lose in our data world. Odell talks about the difference between connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is access to information. Sensitivity is the capacity to actually register what you have access to. Sometimes we conflate the two, imagining that access to information is the same as understanding it.
Accessing information keeps getting easier. Absorbing that information doesn’t necessarily follow the same trajectory. Dashboards, for example, are connectivity infrastructure, but they do little for the sensitivity of the audience.
The ability to receive — be sensitivity to — information takes two things:
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Attention that is focused on the information. As William James said: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Without selective interest, the world becomes a kind of gray chaos. But attention gives it accent and emphasis, light and shade. Like using focus in a photograph, we can bring a subject forward and let the complexity of all the other information fall away. We know this is a problem with reporting and dashboards.
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The terrain in which the information exists. Context. Jenny Odell calls this “bioregionalism.” She describes it as the practice of really know the place you live in. In her birdwatching example, it is about knowing the trees, birds, seasons, and relationships between them. In data, it is about the audience having a mental model of the system that the number comes from. A number — churn, sales, new customers, performance scores — doesn’t land if there isn’t a fully-fleshed concept of its real meaning.
If people give your data attention and know the terrain, does that mean they will care about it? I think these are necessary but insufficient criteria. They provide a place for the number to land, but not the human desire to give a damn.
When I return: So, what does it take to make someone really care about a number that I am delivering to them?
