‘This book is a series of vignettes, tiny windows looking in on our lives – what brings us together, what pulls us apart, what makes us who we are. As the data keeps coming, the windows will get bigger, but there’s plenty to see right now, and the first glimpse is always the most thrilling. So to the sills, I’ll boost you up.’
In an age whe
re ‘privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun,’ Christian Rudder’s new book Dataclysm, published today, provides an irreverent, provocative, and visually fascinating look at what our online lives reveal about who we really are – and how this deluge of data will transform the science of human behaviour. Big Data is used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us things we don’t need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder, founder of one of the world’s biggest dating websites OkCupid, puts this flood of information to an entirely different use: understanding human nature. Drawing on terabytes of data from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, OkCupid, and many other sites, he examines the terrain of human experience to answer a range of questions: Does it matter where you went to school? How racist are we? How do political views alter relationships?
