Does the rise of data sound the death knell for creativity?

I have something of a man crush on data – ever since I started chatting to our MSR folks who are big on machine learning. This month’s GOOD magazine is a great read to give you a sense of how we’re becoming a data driven world; it’s subtitled “The Data Issue” and all of the content is now online.

Our world is awash with data and it’s growing at a phenomenal rate, in large part due to the number of connected, intelligent devices in our world. As noted recently, intelligent systems number over 1.8 billion units and over $1 trillion in revenue today – predicted to grow to nearly 4 billion units and over $2 trillion in revenue by 2015.

I found the Self Storage feature in GOOD to be a great read as it uses historical, non-digital data gathering to show us the potential we now have with all of the digital goodies in our midst.

Perhaps the most enlightening and depressing of the collection of features is Alissa Walker’s on the how creativity in writing has been ruined by the data we now have on readership. It’s all about clicks right? The hamsterization of journalism and the incessant list and slideshows of the web.

It is depressing to see good journalism lose out to clicks but there will always be a market for well written things…it just may be a small market. My personal view, which I shared at a recent HSBC conference, is that this rise in data will be matched by a growth in jobs for information experts – folks like Nicholas Felton and Manuel Lima who can bring data to life with visualizations.

Perhaps journalists should start retraining now as visualization and infographic experts?