It’s a balance that gets drilled into us early in our education: the teacher sets us an assignment, we are given a time limit in which to complete the assignment, and we understand that there is a certain level of quality which needs to be reached.
Hand the assignment in too quickly, and receive a stern telling off from dear teacher for rushing our work.
Pour our heart and soul into the assignment – draft, re-draft and draft it again – and then hand in a perfect piece of work one week beyond the deadline, and we find ourselves in detention so fast it makes our heads spin.This is a lesson in reality that we carry through our whole lives: success means striking the perfect balance between quality and timeliness.
But the world is accelerating. Conference calls which span continents, reports which are commissioned and delivered within hours, real time data access, input and interpretation; all of this is now possible.
So, it makes sense that data visualization should follow this trend. Real time visualization feels like the next step. But should we be in such a rush to earn that extra gold star by turning our assignments in so far ahead of time?
The Age of “The Hot Take”
In reality, instant access and interpretation is causing us problems. The landscape of round-the-clock news coverage and immediate insight has left news organizations scrabbling to give us the news when it breaks. Not days, hours or even minutes after it breaks, but literally *when* it breaks.
This has had tremendous ramifications within news journalism and within the communities these outlets serve.
An article published by The Atlantic in 2013 found glaring data omissions in the reporting of stories relating to the 2001 anthrax panic, the Iraq War, the Enron collapse, and the Vioxx scandal.When Anders Breivik perpetrated horrific mass murder on a Norwegian island in 2011, less scrupulous publishers were quick to shoehorn the shocking events into the narrative of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism before the truth became known. As recently as March of this year, in the wake of the terrorist attack outside the British parliament building, commentators were quick to share and discuss a photograph of an apparently unconcerned Muslim woman, which had been taken wildly out of context.
The frightening truth is, data can be misinterpreted in the heat of the moment –…
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