Why data without soul is meaningless

As we move towards a quantified society, one shaped by data, we start to dismiss things that are unquantified, writes Om Malik of GigaOm. Empathy, emotion and storytelling — these are as much a part of business as they are of life.

“The problem with data is that the way it is used today, it lacks empathy and emotion. Data is used like a blunt instrument, a scythe trying to cut and tailor a cashmere sweater.” […]

“What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.”