Dataclysm: What our online lives tell us about our offline selves

(Paperback)

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Founder of OK Cupid, Christian Rudder, reveals the myriad and mind-blowing possibilities of harnessing big data, and explores what our digital footprints can tell us about human relationships.
In an hour, ten million pictures go up on Facebook. Each day, more people flirt on OkCupid than live in Chicago. We've all heard these types of numbers before; but in Datacysm, for the first time, we can actually feel their impact. We can see the actual information being created and what we can learn from it.

Christian Rudder is one of the founders of OK Cupid, Americas biggest dating site, and so is in possession of one of the richest interpersonal datasets in the world. In this book, he takes data from OK Cupid, and also from other sites Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, last.fm, LinkedIn, Uber, Reddit, and so on all the messaging, the flirting, the posting, the trolling, the liking, the hating, and makes something wonderful.

While most popular nonfiction takes something small and uses it as a lens for big events, Dataclysm does the opposite. It takes something big the enormous dataset of everything that we're doing and saying and thinking and teases from it many small things: how a joke changes in the telling, whether it really matters where you went to college, how people decide whos beautiful and who isnt. This book is a series of statistical vignettes, tiny windows, looking in on slices of life.

One day soon there will be many people whose entire lives have been mediated through their digital devices. Then well really be able to see whats what. In the meantime, with the data he has collected, Christian Rudder has forged a new genre of statistical writing, where numbers become narrative.

Reviews

The best book that I've read on data in years, perhaps ever. If you want to understand how data is affecting the present and what it portends for the future, buy it now Huffington Post

A fun, visual book and a necessary one at that Max Wallis, Independent, Books of the Year

Fascinating, funny, and occasionally howl-inducing [Rudder] is a quant with soul, and were lucky to have him Elle

Most data-hyping books are vapour and slogans. This one has the real stuff: actual data and actual analysis taking place on the page. Thats something to be praised, loudly and at length. Praiseworthy, too, is Rudders writing, which is consistently zingy and mercifully free of Silicon Valley business gabble Washington Post

Dataclysm is a well-written and funny look at what the numbers reveal about human behavior in the age of social media. Its both profound and a bit disturbing, because, sad to say, were generally not the kind of people we like to think or say we are Salon

There's another side of Big Data you haven't seen It's the big data that rears its ugly head and tells us what we don't want to know. And that, as Christian Rudder demonstrates in his new book, Dataclysm, is perhaps an equally worthwhile pursuit. Before we heighten the human experience, we should understand it first TIME

Author Bio

Christian Rudder is co-founder of OkCupid and now serves as chief data analyst and author of the popular blog OkTrends. He graduated from Harvard in 1998 with degrees in English and math, and served as creative director for SparkNotes. His work has been written about in the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other places. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.