Asian Angle | Don’t turn Big Data into a fetish – it missed Trump, Brexit, Duterte
We must be data-informed, not data-driven – or continue to be wrong-footed by surveys that only reinforce human bias
I recently gave a talk at the Communications Asean Summit in Kuala Lumpur. There I was, a tukang cerita (or storyteller) among techies, start-up founders and data evangelists. The message of the multiple speakers was loud and clear: Goodbye subjectivity, the 21st Century is the age of Big Data (i.e. the ability to process huge data sets – quintillions of bytes of information)
But is it really?
Last year, at the height of US elections, I was in Houston, Texas spending some time with the Vidanas, two Mexican-American brothers living in the suburbs of the oil-rich city. The two gun-loving conservatives were staunch Donald Trump supporters despite their Latino heritage. This was puzzling to me: the Orange One had threatened to build a wall and kick out people like them!
But after spending a few days with them, hanging around local taquerias (taco joints), marvelling at their little gun shop, speaking to their parents (and cousins and grandparents and so on), I got a sense of why they might look up to Trump.
Sitting in their backyard – where a drug dealer had left bullet holes in their fence – I could feel their frustration with the status quo, their desperation for change that no survey asking to rate their disappointment on a scale from 1 to 10 could really capture.
On polling day, The New York Times posted a prediction that there was an 85 per cent chance for a Clinton victory. After weeks of speaking face-to-face with ordinary people from different walks of life all over the United States, I wasn’t so sure.