Showing posts with label Big Data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Data. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World Part 25 - Understanding the Shifting Fiction Market

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World
Part 25
Understanding the Shifting Fiction Market 
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous entries in Marketing Fiction in a Changing World are indexed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

We have discussed issues of "Marketing" (a whole profession independent writers have to master) and we have discussed the nature of FICTION (storytelling) in mechanical detail and as an Art Form.  Under the topics related to Theme, we have discussed the everyday world your readers live in and what that has to do with their taste in fiction.

We have looked at these various topics as fairly static in time.  They are not static.  But to grasp the nature and shape of the way they change with time, a writer must first see the static flash-photograph.

If you've got that set of static images in your mind, now is a good time to start animating it.

The world is changing.

Science Fiction can be about the past, the present or the future, and so can science fiction romance or Paranormal Romance.

In fact the most interesting novels, and classics in the making, tend to involve glimpses of how the far past, the intermediate past, and the present combine to generate the future -- how a timeline is all connected.

To create this animated vision for your readers you need to do a lot of detailed worldbuilding that does not appear in your story, and that your characters (and readers) know nothing about.

The world you build for your Characters has to be more internally consistent than our everyday real world.  You achieve that by focusing on a singular Theme, or for a series, a Theme Bundle (set of related statements about reality which can be disproved by refuting any one of them.)

Science Fiction and Science Fiction Romance are genres that feature "science" foremost.  Today, that has translated into "technology."

Star Trek featured the technology of the future by naming devices by their function -- "Phaser" or "Transporter."  We use technology to create tools to do things so we can free up our capacity to do other things.

We, as a world, are in the process of leaping across a technological chasm even the writers of Star Trek could not envision.  In fact, some argue, the advent of that TV Series did a lot to spur the creation of the present world's technology (such as computers, the internet and even the Web).

Today, those who grew up since 1990 have coined the term "inter-web" because they don't have a clue what the difference is between the internet and the web.  They have no idea where the concept "browser" came from or how that concept changed everything about how we use computers -- and now mobile devices more powerful than desktops built in the year 2000.

And change is not "done" yet -- the pace is increasing toward self-driving cars and even autonomous cars.  Everyone I know wants a household robot to act as personal maid, butler, footman, gardener -- all by one walking device.

The flying car is furiously being invented.

We think of these things as the forces that will shape the future, and the readers now growing up on currently published fiction (and Netflix Originals streaming).

But as science fiction writers we have to consider an even larger, more stealthy force, and what that force might yet do to the way our future readers will live.

That force that must be factored into the swirling and conflicting forces producing A.I. and autonomous transportation (there go the truck driver jobs, and ALL the Romances about falling in love with a truck driver).

The entire "Internet of Things" or IoT is a bigger force for the change in the way we see the world and interact with each other, most importantly the way we govern ourselves -- maybe even for Religion as part of the social order.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-internet-of-things-comes-to-the-lab-1.21383?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews  

The IoT is all about your connected Thermostat, household Security cameras and motion detectors, taking care of your kids who are at home while you are at work by being able to see them on your phone and talk over loudspeakers into your home -- being able to track their phones, knowing where your car is at every moment, how fast it is traveling, whether it did an illegal turn.  "Things" will come to include dishwshers, clothes washers, maybe clothes themselves which will tattle on you when you don't exercise enough.

On the one hand, IoT gives you command of many functions with very little effort (other than upgrade-hell and being hacked).

On the other hand, Privacy is a thing of the past.  Already government is claiming rights over your phone's contents.  How many generations until government wins the point because nobody is alive who remembers what it is to "be alone."

We use "baby monitors" to be sure our infant is still breathing.  How many generations until every breath you take your whole life long can become a matter of public record if someone doesn't like something else you did?

The key to understanding human behavior for the purposes of writing science fiction is to understand that the most powerful human survival trait is adaptability.

Even animals do not have the adaptability that humans have.

We are seeing animal species adapt to city life, or life in cages, and lose the ability to survive in "the wild" where the species would ordinarily live.  They are even adapting to a poisoned environment.

Life is adaptable -- but it generations and a lot of death.

Humans can adapt faster.  Not being instinct driven, we produce in each generation a few who can and do think the unthinkable and do the impossible, redefining parameters for the next generation.

But just like animals, we lose previously perfected survival skills.  How many of us city dwellers could walk across a continent without trails, paths or roads, without water fountains and motels?  Who among us is fit to go where no man has gone before?

Yet, humanity does keep producing that sort of person -- and many today are persisting in acquiring basic skills like metal working, quilt making, weaving.

Meanwhile, tides of everyday experience are sweeping toward the computer driven, artificial intelligence, world.

Sneaking up on us from the depths of that world is the tsunami of what is now called Big Data.

As noted  previously
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/04/theme-archetype-integration-part-5.html
all our governments, on whichever governing theory you choose, have for centuries been making decisions based on "statistics."

Statistics does not "work backwards."  You can accurately predict the behavior of a large group of people, but you can not discover anything at all about a single member of that group.

In other words, all "prejudice" that we take for granted today, is rooted in a false premise.

1. The Super Rich Do A Lot of Harm
2. Dick is Super Rich
3. Therefore Dick Does A Lot Of Harm

That's a false paradigm, not because of Dick's individual traits, but because it attempts to work statistics backwards -- to infer something about an individual member of a group by attributing a proven trait of the group to an individual member of the group.

Statistics will work well to govern nations provided the governors of the nations are willing to mash, slaughter, violate, and even annihilate pockets of individuals.

The stealth trend that science fiction writers trying to write "classics" that will be readable in the future (worth reprinting) originates at the junction of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

Even today, the entire premise of Statistics as a governing tool is being discarded.  So far, we don't exactly have anything to replace it, so a writer trying to portray life 50 years from now has to guess what will replace Statistics.

The current scientific guess is Big Data.

To write science fiction, you can choose a Theme based on "Big Data Will Solve All Human Problems" -- e.g. no more poverty, drug addiction, murderous rage, road rage, sexual jealousy.

Or you can choose to write about the next huge shift, and choose a Conflict rooted in the crusade to replace Big Data and restore Privacy by discovering a new principle on which to govern humanity.

Or perhaps you might choose a premise based on genetically altering humanity to erase the combative tendency?

None of those choices would necessarily show up in your Characters, their Conflicts, or the Resolution of those conflicts.  It would be nothing but background.  If a character wanted to travel from one person's living room to another person's back yard for a barbecue, they might summon an A.I. driven Uber car -- or just step through a "door" projected by their pocket device? Or projected by a brain implant.

Whatever changes you depict as the way your Characters live and procreate, they may seem ridiculous to future readers -- or spookily prescient.

Mostly, science fiction writers working in their "near future" write "cautionary tales" -- depicting a world they really do not want to see realized.

We are currently living in such a world - predicted very accurately in the 1940's and 1950's science fiction novels.  But while predicting much of the difficulties we are dealing with (including global warming), they fail utterly to envision anything like the World Wide Web, or Web commerce.

This absence of smartphones and web commerce affects how a Scene can be framed, what the annoying difficulties a character faces are, and how quickly and efficiently they can discover facts.  Nobody predicted Google in your pocket!  Or Twitter and flashmobs.

A good place to begin thinking about where we are now, as opposed to where we were 50 years ago, and thus where we will be in 50 years from now (when your books will be reprinted if they are classics), is to watch some old movies.

Netflix will surface some of the great ones.  Check Amazon Prime video for old TV Shows.

Then read some of the novels popular at those times.  Science Fiction is not really the best field to read to nail a historical point to extrapolate from.

Romances written 50 years ago as "Contemporary" will give you a lot of information about how the world seemed, but you tend to get a lot of gut-churning cultural static embedded in old Contemporary Romance.  Women had a different self-image at that time, and taught their daughters a different self image (more child-like, to prepare for a life of dependence and perpetual pregnancy).

Humans are adaptable, and women have (since cave dwelling days) adapted to being the victims of their physiology.  Science has produced tools to get a handle on those problems (and we're still arguing over how to use those tools without abusing the power they bestow), and that has changed the world.

So reading old Contemporary Romance is good for learning how vastly birth control has changed the world, but the study is hard on a modern-adapted psyche.  Historical Romance set in the 1950's (or 1800's Europe) written today generally puts a female character with today's attitudes into that old world -- and thus loses verisimilitude.

Do a contrast/compare study between Contemporary Romance written in 1950's and Historical Romance written today but set in the 1950's.

You will see why, when setting your Science Fiction Romance in the future, you must change the Character's self-image to be a product of their time, not ours.

Today's kids, growing up with a phone in their pocket, are going to have a different self-image -- about what they can do, or not do, what they want to do or refuse to do, and whether or not anyone will ever know what they did.

That attitude shift about Privacy will definitely affect how you can plot a Mystery Novel.

Remember how often I've mentioned that Science Fiction writers often moonlight as Mystery writers (or Western writers) because the fields are the same -- and most science fiction readers also read Mystery and Westerns.

Mystery is allied with the 'science' aspects of science fiction and Westerns are allied with the "where no man has gone before" exploration of outer space, meeting Aliens (Indians), dimensions of science fiction.

Here is a very old Mystery series that depicts and reveals the contemporary world of the 1960's (a famous period of social change well captured here).

The Rabbi Small Novels[edit]
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late – 1964
Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry – 1966
Sunday, the Rabbi Stayed Home – 1969
Monday The Rabbi Took Off – 1972
Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red – 1973
Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet – 1976
Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out – 1978
Conversations with Rabbi Small – 1981
Someday the Rabbi Will Leave – 1985
One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross – 1987
The Day the Rabbi Resigned – 1992
That Day the Rabbi Left Town – 1996

There are by the famous (then) best selling mystery writer Harry Kemelman, and here is his wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kemelman

Read a few of these.  They are in Kindle and very cheap and easy to find (that old Internet Commerce change.)

In the 1960's people had to spend hours and hours in libraries, try to order books via inter-library loan, only to discover they were no longer available.

Revel in today's fingertip availability - understand what it means to the world view and self-image of the current teens.

Pick a few Historic points, draw the line connecting them and extrapolate that line into the future of 50 years from now.  How will Romance happen?  How will people meet each other?  Will "dating sites" turn into something more in the world of Big Data and lack of privacy?  Will marriages always work when arranged by a particular site?

Will a proprietary algorithm be hoarded by that particular dating site?  Will courts demand they give it away so everyone can benefit?

Will government take over dating sites and provide that free service as part of your health-care rights (after all a bad marriage can drive you crazy and stress your body to where you die young!)

What sort of ways will people find to do murder, and what tools will detectives of that future use to uncover the dastardly deed?

Isaac Asimov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov
 wrote the Black Widdow science fiction mysteries that were extremely popular, and Randall Garrett created the Lord Darcy character, a detective who used Magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Darcy_(character)

All science is detective work.  And it can be argued that all Romance is detective work - one must "detect" what is motivating the potential spouse.  "What does she see in him?" is the key question.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

The answer changes with time and the depth and breadth of knowledge of the other person's behavior.

If you can develop and unfold a Relationship for your readers, you can develop and unfold an entire world for those readers.  The skills are the same, but the material differs.

Watch some old TV, and read some old books, then observe how you solve problems today -- a leaky roof, a car that won't start, a subway train that's late, an internet connection that does not work, a store that's out of a critical item.

What mysteries have you solved today?  Watch your mind problem-solve, and what tools you reach for without thinking, -- then see how your future self will target these problems 50 years from now.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Theme-Archetype Integration Part 5 - The Minority Speaks

Theme-Archetype Integration
Part 5
The Minority Speaks
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts in this Theme-Archetype Integration series

Part 1 - The Nature of Art
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/12/theme-archetype-integration-part-1.html

Part 2 - How to Tell Hero From Villain
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/01/theme-archetype-integration-part-2-how.html

Part 3 - Showing Character Without Telling
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/01/theme-archetype-integration-part-3.html

Part 4 - Ownership and Marriage
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/01/theme-archetype-integration-part-4.html

And previously on Marriage:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/01/if-hea-is-implausible-how-come-it.html

Here are some posts on Theme.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/03/soul-mate-characters-heroic-villainous.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

This post is of use to Fantasy writers creating Kings, Princes, Dukes and other marriageable scions of high society.  It is the kind of thinking necessary to create original Fantasy, not derivative Fantasy.

We'll consider the plight of the minority. and how that plight is now changing fast.  

So Theme is a statement (or question) derived from the Artist's view of the universe, from the Vision of Reality the Artist sees that others may easily miss.

Husband and Wife might usefully be viewed as an Archetype - The Couple. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

The King, The Warrior, The Warrior-King, The Priest, The Hero, The Villain, and  are classic Character Archetypes. 

Just because you don't have a Kingdom doesn't mean you aren't a King.

We have the "Man is the King of his Castle" idea enshrined in law.  Even if you are just renting, you are King -- you get to kill robbers who break in and threaten your life.

THEME: Humans are territorial animals. 

ARCHETYPE: King of his Castle. 

Lord of the Manor:  Baron. 

Even in the U.S.A., we have established a Peerage, a Hierarchy of "importance" -- often based on wealth, as in any Aristocracy, but also very much based on "Rights" and "Privileges." 

Privileges are not rights -- they are earned. 

One must qualify for a privilege.  The theory in the U.S.A. is that anyone can qualify for any privilege, but you don't get the privilege unless you qualify. 

That theory is being altered by the adamant support for the idea of "White Privilege" -- that only "white" humans can qualify for, and that they qualify for it without actually doing anything but being born. 

In an Aristocracy, certain individuals are chosen by a King to be elevated to the Peerage. 

In the U.S.A., you are entitled to trial by a jury of your peers.

I've seen many juries empaneled who did not seem, to me, to be the peer of the person on trial.  For example, O.J. Simpson. Nobody on his jury was a celebrity of such renown, so not one person on that jury was his "peer."  So in what way do we get trial by our peers?

Note the relationship between the word Peer, and the word Peerage.  A Peerage is a hierarchy of aristocrats, a list of successors, a hereditary position. 

Peerage - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerage
A peerage is a legal system historically comprising hereditary titles in various countries, comprising various noble ranks. Peerages include: ...

Peerage | Define Peerage at Dictionary.com
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/peerage
Peerage definition, the body of peers of a country or state. See more.

Peerages - definition of Peerages by The Free Dictionary
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Peerages
The rank, title, or jurisdiction of a peer or peeress; a duchy, marquisate, county, viscountcy, or barony. 2. Peers and peeresses considered as a group. 3. A book ...

A Peer is your equal, someone born at the same "level" as you were.

To have a society arranged by Peers is to imply that not everyone is "equal" to everyone else.  We are not all the same.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the U.S.A. were written by Aristocrats steeped in British culture as well as a pioneering culture.  They came up with a blend of Democracy (mob rule: two lions and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch), and a Republic (the Roman Empire model).  Well educated men (all men) decided to invent an entirely new form of social organization.

Never before, not even in Biblical times, was such a free hand invention promulgated -- and it has worked (sort of) for more than 2 centuries (baby on the World Stage).

They had lived under British Rule, and so they understood the concept Peerage in ways you and I do not.  When they wrote "jury of peers," they knew what they meant.  We do not know.  Even modern day Brits do not really know. 

But we, Fantasy writers, can imagine or invent new meanings and create worlds inhabited by humans alongside non-humans (Fairies, Elves, Trolls, Zombies, Vampires, Gnomes, Griffins, Furies).

Last week, we discussed the TV Series, Lucifer, and the way Fantasy handles the archetype The Immortal.  And we delved into how your Self-Image (personally, as the writer) is visible to readers in your Theme, even when you can't see it yourself. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/04/self-image-and-tree-of-life-by.html

There we referred to an article on bbc.com about scientific studies of Eastern and Western civilizations and how they think in profoundly different ways -- Collectivism vs Individualism.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in-profoundly-different-ways

Think now about whether Immortals form a Group - or a "level" -- a Peerage? 

What exactly is a Peerage?  What differentiates King from Duke from Baron?

Basically, it is wealth -- the amount of Land each level commands.  All Barons are peers as they control about the same amount of land (and number of peasants to work that land).  Dukes command (not own, as the King owns all) a number of Baronies.  And Kings command all the Dukes, Counts, every level.

Kings get to command them all by virtue of owning all the land, and then handing command of the various segments to the various levels.

Originally, (as far back as Biblical times) Kings got to be King by leading armies to conquer and just TAKE the land.  And then they would appoint men who had fought well and loyally for them during that campaign to command sections of land. 

In return, the appointed ones got to keep profits from their lands, but had to be able to muster troops for the King when battle might loom.

So a King is peer only to another King, Counts and Dukes are at about the same level, one step below the King, and Barons etc are peer to other Barons etc.  Who is heir to whom, and who inherits what depends a lot on who marries whom.

So we get to the "arranged" marriage -- and the social rules about marrying someone who is not your peer. 

It is all an imaginary way to create "levels" or "classes" or "castes" in human society. 

Can you imagine a society of humans, a state or country, where all humans are entirely and completely equal to, the peer of, absolutely identical to, every other human?  All have the same amount of money, the same square feet of apartment, the same clothes?

It is easy to imagine such a situation among Aliens from Outer Space, harder to see it among Fantasy creatures.  Most of our classical mythology depicts the society of the gods in a heirarchy under a King. 

I don't know any myth system that has more than One God that depicts all the supernatural beings as identical or in any way equal.

There is always a contest, a competition, to see which is more powerful than the other.  We see that in the story of the Exodus where there is a contest (of sorts) between the Egyptian gods and the Creator of the Universe. 

So even our Heavens are created in a hierarchy of non-equals.

The framers said "All Men Are Created Equal" -- but they didn't say that men had to stay that way (and of course never mentioned women -- boy, did they get blindsided or what?)

THEME: there is something in human nature that requires social hierarchy for health, but how hierarchy is created differs vastly.

Concurrently with the Framers of the Constitution being born and growing up, being educated and founding fortunes, France was brewing the ouster of its Peerage and science was gathering steam as mathematics and data handling became possible.

Change moves so fast now that we forget it took a century to accomplish what we have done in the last few decades.

Population is exploding, and with it the task of governing so many people has become nearly impossible. 

Therefore, we have resorted to dividing human population into neat little compartments containing humans who are all equal to each other.  But the inhabitants of a compartment are not equal to the inhabitants of another compartment.  The science of this is called Statistics.

Creating and defining "compartments" must precede "getting organized" or creating a government.  A government can't govern if it does not know what exactly it is governing and to what end it is shaping the behavior of that population.

Dukes needed farmers and ranchers to work the land, artisans to manufacture things (such as weapons) and soldiers and Knights to answer the King's muster.  Dukes might enjoy or just tolerate minstrels to keep the peasants entertained.  That was the mob they had to govern, and it was pretty simple as they knew almost everyone by name or surname.

Here is an article that traces the development of the information that government needed to govern as the Middle Class developed, nations conquered more territory, and Kings confronted other Kings further and further away.  It delves back to the 15th Century and shows what kind of change we are in the middle of now.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/19/crisis-of-statistics-big-data-democracy

This article from The Guardian presents the thesis that Statistics has lost the confidence of the public because it is impossible to take small, local communities into account when measuring national level statistics such as unemployment and GDP.  It is a great article, long and complicated, but Fantasy Writers inventing Kingdoms and Wars (with Elves, Goblins, or whatever) need to read this article and understand what it says and why it says it.  In short, it says statistics is regarded as vulgar.

But at the same time as you read in The Guardian, keep in mind this item on statistics failing to capture cervical cancer rates, and why reports indicated the cervical cancer rates were lower than they really are.  I think THIS is the real reason people distrust statistics these days.

It is from a newsletter called The Skimm January 24, 2017.
http://www.theskimm.com/

--------quote The Skimm----
WHAT TO SAY WHEN YOU FINALLY GET AROUND TO MAKING YOUR ANNUAL APPOINTMENT...

Important. A new study found that cervical cancer is a bigger threat to US women than people realized. For years, the mortality rate for the disease was based on data that included women who’ve had hysterectomies. Hysterectomy: the procedure that typically removes a woman’s cervix, and - yup - the risk of cervical cancer. Once the data excluded those ladies, it showed a different picture. Even worse, the death rate is much higher for black women than white women. Some doctors say that could be because black women don’t have equal access to screenings or health coverage. Big problem.

---------end quote---------

And here is an excerpt from the article in The Guardian about why statistics has lost public confidence.  Convey this information to your reader using dialogue in short, snappy sentences fraught with subtext.

--------quote-----------
There was initially only one client for this type of expertise, and the clue is in the word “statistics”. Only centralised nation states had the capacity to collect data across large populations in a standardised fashion and only states had any need for such data in the first place. Over the second half of the 18th century, European states began to collect more statistics of the sort that would appear familiar to us today. Casting an eye over national populations, states became focused upon a range of quantities: births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, harvests, imports, exports, price fluctuations. Things that would previously have been registered locally and variously at parish level became aggregated at a national level.

New techniques were developed to represent these indicators, which exploited both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the page, laying out data in matrices and tables, just as merchants had done with the development of standardised book-keeping techniques in the late 15th century. Organising numbers into rows and columns offered a powerful new way of displaying the attributes of a given society. Large, complex issues could now be surveyed simply by scanning the data laid out geometrically across a single page.
---------end quote---------

The thesis of this long document is that Statistics is now distrusted because it captures the aggregate behavior of large populations but does not address the experience of the individual.  Here's how the article puts it:

---------quote-------
Blindness to local cultural variability is precisely what makes statistics vulgar and potentially offensive
------unquote----------

Note this article is in THE GUARDIAN, so use of the word "vulgar" is possibly misleading to Americans. 

The writer of Fantasy Romance may gain a lot by being skeptical of the idea that blindness to local cultural variability has anything to do with why the general population of the 21st century "distrusts" statistics.  Again, consider the "scientists" and "mathematicians" who decided to lump women who had their cervix surgically removed with those who had not, to create a low-incidence statistic.

Would you choose to include women who had their breasts removed in statistics of the incidence of breast cancer?

Science is now and always has been under pressure by politics and religion to get the results that are most profitable or beneficial to those in political or religious power positions.  Science has fought against this, but we never know which topic will fail to resist pressure.  That trait is the source of wonderful plot twists.

One alternative idea to explore is innate in the mathematics behind statistics -- statistics only yields useful information when analyzed in one direction, but not ever in the other direction.

Prejudice, (ethnocentrism, racism, bigotry) are cognitive errors based on trying to work a statistical equation backwards. 

For Example:
1. Most Terrorists are Muslim
2. This person is a Muslim
3. Therefore this person is a Terrorist

Or another example:
1. White races have unique unearned privileges
2. This person is of a white race
3. Therefore this person has had advantages of privilege unearned

Statistics, plain math, counting, multiplying, dividing -- very simple stuff -- can determine that most individuals of a category of human share a certain trait.  But statistics can not determine if any given member of that category of human actually has that common trait.

Statistics can not work backwards.

-----quote-----------
 In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have “lost touch” with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular.
--------end quote-------

Yet most media outlets, even school textbooks these days, and general conversational English assumes that statistics does indeed work backwards -- what math can reveal about a Group can tell you something about any individual member of that group. 

Hillary Clinton became famous for the phrase, "Basket of Deplorables" - lumping all supporters of Donald Trump together as a category (basket) and assigning them all the quality "deplorable." 

You had only to have a certain Presidential Preference to get into the basket -- so if you were in the basket, you also necessarily shared an unrelated trait, deplorable.

Statistically, that may be accurate, but faced with an individual supporter of Donald Trump, you dare not assume that individual is a "deplorable."  That individual may in fact have non-deplorable reasons for preferring Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, or they might just be wholly ignorant of Trump's misdeeds. 

Statistics can't tell you anything about an individual.  But it is a powerful tool for analyzing large bodies of data.

This article from The Guardian shows you the historical link between Liberal Democracy and Statistics via the history of government. 

--------quote---------

Then it shows you the way Statistics as a science is being disrupted or rendered useless by the whirlwind of technological change.

--------quote--------
For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
-----------end quote----------

As we've discussed many times, the entire science of Public Relations (PR) and thus the big business of Advertising (getting people to do something against their own best interests and for your profit), is based on the mathematics and science of Statistics.

------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relationsJump to Definition - "Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics." Public relations can also be defined as the practice of managing communication between an organization and its publics.
-----------

Note that definition says "mutually beneficial."  If it requires "strategy" to make someone do something, then that something is not beneficial to the one strategized against. 

You use "strategy" to get people to do things that benefit you, and you tell yourself it is "for their own good." 

You don't need strategy to make people do things beneficial to themselves.  Strategy is a form of aggression and there's nothing micro about it.  Hobson's Choice is a strategy to make someone take an unacceptable option to the benefit of Hobson.

The essence of Story is Conflict.

Conflict illustrates or symbolizes Theme. 

So the problem is to govern a large and growing population of Individualists who don't know what's good for them (but you do). 

It takes centuries, but you finally get a handle on it via Statistics so you can predict how sub-groups of the population will react.

Then, suddenly, they don't react as expected (Brexit, Trump).

Why? What happened?

Twitter.  Facebook.  Big Data.

Read this article from The Guardian we've been discussing.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/19/crisis-of-statistics-big-data-democracy
-------quote---------
The rise of identity politics since the 1960s has put additional strain on such systems of classification. Statistical data is only credible if people will accept the limited range of demographic categories that are on offer, which are selected by the expert not the respondent. But where identity becomes a political issue, people demand to define themselves on their own terms, where gender, sexuality, race or class is concerned.
-------end quote--------

"Basket of Deplorables" is a demographic category chosen by someone other than a denizen of that basket.

The denizens of the basket, now living in a customizable world thanks to Microsoft, want to define their own basket. 

------------quote--------
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation. Traditionally, statisticians have known which questions they wanted to ask regarding which population, then set out to answer them. By contrast, data is automatically produced whenever we swipe a loyalty card, comment on Facebook or search for something on Google. As our cities, cars, homes and household objects become digitally connected, the amount of data we leave in our trail will grow even greater. In this new world, data is captured first and research questions come later.

In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century. The rise of “big data” provides far greater opportunities for quantitative analysis than any amount of polling or statistical modelling. But it is not just the quantity of data that is different. It represents an entirely different type of knowledge, accompanied by a new mode of expertise.
-----------end quote---------

So suddenly the goal is no longer to predict the behavior of large groups of humans -- but rather to predict and prompt/guide the behavior of individuals. (Facebook ads; Google Adwords).

Facebook and Google show you ads for products you've been browsing, or related items others like you might have bought.  ("like you" is rapidly becoming much more accurate.)

THEME: This application of technology, Data Mining, is going to render the Character Motivations you use in your novels that you are writing, incomprehensible to readers 20 or 40 years from now.

Think about that.  If you wrote a novel today that used Character Motivations rooted in the culture that will grow out of being governed not by a government of statistics (GDP) but of Big Data, customized government, personally customized LAWS???  -- today's readers would not understand that Character.

The Regency Romances being written today depict the women as 21st Century, individually strong, independently minded humans.  They were not any such thing.  Even those with a character pre-disposed to independent thinking were emotionally crippled compared to today's woman.

Think about a writer 40 years from now depicting you, today, without understanding the statistics driven world?

What is the looming statistical horror of today?  Income Inequality -- the extreme difference between the 1% and the lower 50% of the population.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/depiction-part-6-depicting-money-and.html

What is the biggest issue driving our collective concerns?  Women's health?  Minority Rights?  Women aren't quite a "minority" these days, but at times and in places we have been. 

We have had our first "minority" President in Barak Obama, and almost had the first woman President in Hillary Clinton. 

There is a yearning in the U.S.A. to place "minorities" in government, in "power" (though U.S.A. government officials have no power; only voters have power).

How would someone born and raised in a world where government uses Big Data to manage policies view our driving will to see Minorities rise in the Peerage?

Raised in such a world of the future, would they even know what a "Minority" is?  Or would they care?

From the perspective of that (not so far) future, your readers would be sorely puzzled by the antipathy to Donald Trump and his millionaire riddled cabinet. 

The media is brim full of articles decrying the absurd and insane wealth of the 1%.

The reader raised in our Big Data Governed future will look at those articles and then at all the articles about the unfair treatment of minorities, and be unable to understand why we admire a President from one minority (Blacks) and decry a President from another minority (1%). 

The Super Rich are a very tiny minority, so if we want minorities to take turns governing, then why would we object to the rich getting a turn?

THEME: All Minorities Should Get a Turn Governing

Explain, using symbolism and conflict, why certain minorities (Kings, Dukes) should govern and other minorities should not.

Remember, you are explaining this to a readership that has no concept of "statistics" and thus can not encompass the idea of a "1%" as a category, or a "basket," -- as a homogeneous group.  What do the Super Rich have in common with each other besides money?  Nothing.  So those used to a government guided by Big Data and Deep Diving into Big Data simply have no referent for the concept "the" Super Rich.  They don't have a concept for "Hispanics" or "Blacks" or "Asians" or "Muslims" or "Jews."  These words do no summon to mind a visual of a Group.

Grouping the way we think of it just makes no sense if you are managing individuals by knowing everything about that individual.

Differences matter more than Similarities.

As this article points out, attributes defining groups become "fluid."

Writers who live in that world will put Characters into our world who do not think the way we do.  So what will they think?  How can you explain us to them?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com