Christian Rudder > Quotes

“There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they’re demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we’re changing. All we have to do is look:”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“for anything to be made whole, the first step is to know what’s missing.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters—it embodies William Strunk’s famous dictum, Omit needless words, at the keystroke level.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Tonight, some thirty thousand couples will have their first date because of OkCupid. Roughly three thousand of them will end up together long-term. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them, of course, will have kids. There are children alive and pouting today, grouchy little humans refusing to put their shoes on right now, who would never have existed but for the whims of our HTML.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“He's completely correct, for as with music, as with movies, and as with a wide variety of human phenomena: a flaw is a powerful thing. Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“It even has a name. It’s called WEIRD research: white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And most published social research papers are WEIRD.1”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“I don’t like the dinosaur in this graphic. It looks too fake. Use a real photo of a dinosaur instead.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Everything points to the same conclusion: that Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai. This kind of in-depth analysis (lexical density, word frequency) hints at the real nature of the transformation under way. The change Twitter has wrought on language itself is nothing compared with the change it is bringing to the study of language. Twitter gives us a sense of words not only as the building blocks of thought but as a social connector, which indeed has been the purpose of language since humanity hunched its way across the Serengeti.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“prejudice unchallenged is prejudice perpetuated.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“When you see people in middle management dickering with their Fitbits in the elevator, you know the Quantified Self movement is here to stay. The”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Observers call the phenomenon Black Twitter, described here by Farhad Manjoo in Slate: Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It’s this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“The change Twitter has wrought on language itself is nothing compared with the change it is bringing to the study of language.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the DOLLY Project (Digital OnLine Life and You)—it’s a searchable repository of every geotagged tweet since December 2011,”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Think about the progression of a young relationship. Two people meet for the first time in person. Talk, drink, get to know each other. Next, if there is a next, is the apartments. The unfamiliar number on the door, a brass handle where yours is steel. The strange but pleasant smell of another person’s sheets. Shampoos in the shower, used, but new to you. Loganberry: Okay, why not? Back at your place next time, she opens the fridge, and it’s just … mustards. Sorry.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“The era of data is here; we are now recorded. That, like all change, is frightening, but between the gunmetal gray of the government and the hot pink of product offers we just can’t refuse, there is an open and ungarish way. To use data to know yet not manipulate, to explore but not to pry, to protect but not to smother, to see yet never expose, and, above all, to repay that priceless gift we bequeath to the world when we share our lives so that other lives might be better—and to fulfill for everyone that oldest of human hopes, from Gilgamesh to Ramses to today: that our names be remembered, not only in stone but as part of memory itself.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“The internet has many regrettable sides to it, but that's one thing that's always stood it in good stead with me: it's a writer's world. Your life online is mediated through words. You work, you socialize, you flirt, all by typing. I honestly feel there's a certain epistolary, Austenian grandness to the whole enterprise. No matter what words we use or how we tap out the letters, we're writing to each other now more than ever. Even if sometimes 'dam gerl' is all we have to say.”
― Christian Rudder

“By forcing people to hide, intolerance creates its own cynical logic: when a large portion of a group goes unrecognized, it only makes marginalizing the whole easier. Visibility, on the other hand, creates acceptance.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“until thirty, a woman prefers slightly older guys; afterward, she likes them slightly younger.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Computers, however, have nothing better to do; keeping track is their only job. They don't lose the scrapbook, or travel, or get drunk, or grow senile, or even blink. They just sit there and remember.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“men and women perform a different sexual calculus. As Harper’s put it perfectly: “Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn’t.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Well, this is a rare context where boringness is something special: it implies that the individual men who did the scoring are likewise predictable, centered, and, above all, unbiased. And when you consider the supermodels, the porn, the cover girls, the Lara Croft– style fembots, the Bud Light ads, and, most devious of all, the Photoshop jobs that surely these men see every day, the fact that male opinion of female attractiveness is still where it’s supposed to be is, by my lights, a small miracle. It’s practically common sense that men should have unrealistic expectations of women’s looks, and yet here we see it’s just not true. In any event, they’re far more generous than the women, whose votes go like this: The red chart is centered barely a quarter of the way up the scale; only one guy in six is “above average” in an absolute sense. Sex appeal isn’t something commonly quantified like this, so let me put it in a more familiar context: translate this plot to IQ, and you have a world where the women think 58 percent of men are brain damaged.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It’s the Chris Farley of technologies.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“If you’ve ever signed up for a website and given a fake zip code or a fake birthday, you have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Any child under thirteen who visits newyorktimes.com violates their Terms of Service and is a criminal—not just in theory, but according to the working doctrine of the Department of Justice.1 The examples I’ve laid out are extreme, sure, but the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn’t a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. We’ve seen the same patterns repeated on three different sites, with different users and different experiences: men, women, free, subscription-only, casual, serious, “urban” demographics, and more “mainstream.” All told, the research set represents a large chunk of the young adults in this country, and the data uniformly shows non-blacks discount African American profiles. It’s not a problem caused by a small cluster of “ugly” black users or by a small group of unreformed racists throwing off an otherwise regular pattern.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves