People versus Numbers

I've learned during my study a lot about statistics in combination with philosophy. My favorite professor who taught in methodology of sociological research always told us - numbers are what you say they are. It is true. Numbers are very flexible, they seem to be objective as they are perceived as hard facts. Numbers describe the reality which we can control. Numbers remove the randomness. What I've also learned was the inevitable need for observing  the individual's experiences and ideas. Researchers should study reality as a social actors (subjectively - understanding people's motivations), not as an independent observers (objectively - understanding people as numbers). The truth is that you can never connect with a number. You hear lots of people in media and advertising business claiming that people comes first to add afterwards: we can reach 75% of target group. And so what? 75% can translate in many things depending on what we want to say. But it doesn't say anything constructive, it doesn't help us to lose any communication challenge or neither takes any closer to people (target group as some call them).

I have seen a couple of examples of the numbers tyranny in the pursue of explaining reality. For me it looked more like manipulation and completely lack of understanding of what's going on. This week, there were released to surveys about the use of digital and traditional media in Denmark. First of them, conducted by Explora, focused on the 15-24 years old and the conclusion was: This is a myth that you can't reach young people via TV advertising. Explora found out that young people spend 84 minutes on watching TV and only 11 minutes online. Here comes the best - they measured only 136 Danish websites!! How on earth can you draw any conclusions on youth Internet usage based on 136 websites? Numbers show only the part of reality.

Another research covered the new media usage compared to the traditional media amongst "the early adapters" and was conducted by Danish national TV station TV2 and ACNielsen. The conclusion was: the young people with high interest in technology has still high consumption of traditional media. Research responsible at TV2 believes that the increasing usage of the new media and internet don't decrease the time spent with traditional media, there is no cannibalization. So far so good. The early adapters spend in all 9 hours and 32 minutes daily consuming media (150 min. with TV, 233 min. in front of computer, 35 minutes with other media like game consoles and mp3). I read the article once, twice and I couldn't find anything interesting except some numbers. I didn't learn anything new about media usage.

I wonder why none of the research didn't cover multitasking issue that makes it possible for many to extend media time into 9 hours. None of research come up with the slightest attempt to understand HOW people use the media. Would it be to uncomfortable for the traditional media?

It is so ignorant and one sided picture of reality presented by those two research. I don't believe TV is dead. It is not, the way we use it changed and those numbers don't tell anything about it.

It almost cliche to say it over and over again:  People are first, data are second. Still, it is hard to live up to this sentence, as we are attached to the old media world order. As long as we don't change the terminology and become more curious to see what lies behind the numbers, we will stand still in one place. The world will pass by.

(Read more on statistics here)

Tags: research, numbers, sociology, media consumption