Rice Stats: Exploring Information Gluttony and Apathy

As Dan has discussed, we live in an age of information saturation.  Every day we hear more and more “figures”: rates, percentages, polls, etc.  The 21st century is quickly becoming the “data century.”  And, at least to me, the more data I am forced to digest, the less effect it has on me.  There seems to be some sort of diminishing marginal impact as I am daily bombarded by statistic after statistic.  This new, always-on media culture that we’re living in makes my brain numb to all but the most appalling or surprising information.  This is indeed frightening, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Numbers can be useful indicators, but they can too often be either misleading or woefully inadequate means of conveying the messages they are intended to convey.  To be blunt, let me put it this way: it’s one thing to look at a chart graphing the rising death toll in Kenya or Sudan; it’s another thing to see images of bodies piled up on the streets (and, I’m sure, an even more profound thing to walk amongst those bodies in person).

So here’s something cool I found on BoingBoing today.  An exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles uses rice to create an interesting rendering of various statistics.  Where numbers cannot adequately convey the scale or proportionality of something, rice offers a fresh perspective.

From the site describing the exhibit:

Now in a month-long engagement, Of All the People in All the World will feature more than fifteen tons of rice-900 million grains total, equaling the population of the Americas-organized to bring local, national, and global statistics to life. Artists from the innovative British theater company Stan’s Cafe will carefully weigh and pile the staple food to quantify a variety of facts, from the serious and sobering to the lighthearted. Each grain of rice represents one individual. From the few women ever elected to the U.S. Senate to the multitudes who eat at McDonald’s daily to the Southland residents who walk to work, the statistics portrayed will create an evolving landscape of rice, as the artists dismantle old piles and measure out new ones, often in response to the artists’ interactions with visitors.

And here is a promotional video of the exhibit:

Looking at the “data” represented by piles of rice, you would probably first notice the relationship between two “statistics” (for example, one pile of rice representing the number of child soliders in the world sitting next to a similarly-sized pile representing the number of children aged 10-14 in Los Angeles).  That’s a powerful comparison in itself.  But after about 10 seconds of looking, you realize that you can discern the discrete particles that are making up this pile.  Each grain — whether among a small scattering of other grains, or part of an entire mountain of rice — represents a human being.

Let’s take an example: “The world prison population is about nine million people.”  This may be shocking to many people, but to others it’s just another number.  What, then, if I called you outside your home or office, and then spilled a sack of nine million rice grains onto the ground in front of you and told you that this represented the world’s prison population.  Would you feel differently, watching as this mass of tiny specks scatters across the floor?  Does the ability to see the trees that make up the forest give the forest greater meaning or value?

What would be really interesting is if they were able to also represent the amount of media coverage that was given to different piles of rice.  For example, maybe putting the piles of rice in a dark room, and have the intensity of the spotlight pointed at each pile represent the media coverage given to it.  How much light would there be on the single grain of rice representing Britney Spears, as compared to the light shown on the mountain of rice representing those afflicted with HIV/AIDS.  Just a thought.

I’m not saying numerical statistics aren’t valuable, because they definitely are.  But we need to make sure we’re not letting ourselves become apathetic to them.  Like Dan, I fear that with easy access to information — and with new, easier ways to filter and reduce it – we may come to undervalue it.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user welshkaren.