Katie Bauer!

TL;DR it's statistical turtles all the way down

This may seem navel-gazey, but it’s getting at another of McLuhan’s points. We don't recognize new media when we first encounter it. We only see the old media format inside the new media container, so the new format alters the way we think without us even realizing it's happening

As new media formats extend our senses, we also fail to recognize how much of ourselves we pour into them. We don't realize they're extensions of us, and we become infatuated with them, much like Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection.

It’s easy to see this happening to various degrees to social media users who get invested in their on-site personas, but like I said, I’m more interested in talking about how this applies to data work.

I recommend thinking about metrics as a form of media, a new technology that extends and alters the senses of a business. They work as mental prosthetics for decision makers, helping them quickly understand things about a company that they otherwise would struggle to summarize.

They also abstract the company's performance from the realities of the end users that the company makes decisions on behalf of. People become OBSESSED with metrics, so eager to move them that they forget their product is being used by people with particular goals in mind.

Whatever the original purpose of the product was, it's quickly deprioritized in favor of getting users to do stuff that will cause the trend line of a metric (probably revenue or DAU) to go up and to the right. That's how you get stuff like this.https://twitter.com/LukeW/status/1327349136702672897 …

McLuhan doesn't really seem to be describing this progression of media and ensuing fragmentation as a problem per se, more as an inevitable process. But even though he's not explicitly negative, it does leave me feeling a little ambivalent about my profession