A new “study” finds an obvious fact of life but misuses it dangerously.
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With polarization and misinformation on the rise, new research explores a solution using interactive data visualization to inform and engage readers.
Getting readers of a news story interested in numbers can be a challenge. But the benefits of engaging readers in data can lead to a better understanding, preventing misinformation and misrepresentation in the news.
Acknowledging the complexity of data, which can make it difficult to process, the researchers looked at three methods of data display: plain text, a static visualization, and interactive visualization.
The study showed participants had a difficult time recalling and recognizing the data through text and static visualization. Interactive data visualization led to the most positive outcome variables in terms of information recognition and recall.
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Well, this is what I’ve been doing for 40 years. It’s what real trainers have been doing in the real world for thousands of years. Muscle memory works. Visual memory fails. When you DO a task your cerebellum remembers it.
These journalism types are missing the real point in several ways, probably on purpose.
1. Journalists don’t want to convey information. Journalists want to convey the commands of Deepstate. Commands are not data. Commands can’t be understood or misunderstood. Commands can’t be believed or disbelieved. Commands can’t be proved or disproved. Commands must be obeyed.
2. Even if journalists wanted to convey info, they wouldn’t know how to do it and wouldn’t know how to engage with the people who can do it. Manager types don’t communicate with engineer types. (I’m running into this problem right now.)
3. From a McLuhanish viewpoint, journalists have been working steadily for 100 years to remove all interactivity, to leave no room or time for internal thought and interpretation. Reading leaves plenty of room for your imagination to set up its own scenes and characters. Radio turns the audio side passive but leaves your mind active in the visual realm. Movies and TV provide commands to both senses. After 1970, TV developed a range of specific techniques to phase-lock your entire brain with the incoming COMMAND. Computers initially offered a chance to resume a more active imagination, but Deepstate has been narrowing down the methods, trying to regain the seven-second phaselock.
4. At the specific technical level, the HTML Web does a very poor job of interactivity. In the 40 years I’ve been writing interactive graphic software, I’ve been increasingly frustrated. Before the Web, ordinary computers running the ordinary Windows system had a wonderful set of tools for interactivity. The HTML standard wiped out most of those tools, and various non-standard “standards” and “concern over cybercrime” constantly narrow down the range of available tricks and techniques. When the cyberpolice banned Adobe’s SWF format, the best interactive tool was gone. Globalism always narrows down skills. Graybill’s Law.
Polistra's Mill 