Response to Christine's Question #2

2. As I read Hot, Flat, and Crowded I feel a sense of data suffocation: there is literally too many facts, authorities, statistics, anecdotes, and connections for me to process. How does this method of data-dumping and information-overload help and or hurt Friedman’s ethos? Provide an example from the book to support your argument.

I think that data-dumping hurts Friedman’s ethos by drowning readers with so many examples that no individual story stands out as an emblem or inspiration. By the end of Hot, Flat, and Crowded I felt like I’d read some convincing anecdotes, but when I stopped to think about them I couldn’t remember any single one of them in detail—they all kind of blurred together in my head. For instance, I think I remember Friedman talking about villagers helping protect a nearby forest with orangutans in it—or was it the imam who did that? No, wait, I think the imam was from a different village that had issues with mining pollution coming downstream. Or maybe it was an imam saving orangutans from mining pollution upstream. Or something like that. All Friedman’s cool little stories merge together into an indeterminate saving-the-world stew by the end of the book. I don’t have a clear image to latch onto to really “crystallize” any of his ideas. I can’t go up to someone and recite a convincing anecdote because I don’t remember any of them clearly. Conversely, in a book like Crossing Open Ground, individual events seemed better-defined. I clearly remember the story about the beached whales and would feel confident recounting it to someone else. That story will stick with me longer than any of Friedman’s examples will, no matter how true or useful they are. Maybe it’s like an art gallery: a story elaborated on and displayed in isolation is like a work of art in a gallery surrounded by white space. The very layout makes you stop and stare at the exhibit and remember it. Conversely, examples dumped in rapid succession are like a hundred finger-paintings plastered on a wall at a school. You know they’re there but you never remember any one in particular, and none of them seems super-important or worth lingering over and reflecting on. They’re just decoration.

The feeling of blurring is particularly bad when Friedman’s data collides with his detailed descriptions of hypothetical situations. Human memory tends to hold on to chunks of information but not include their sources. For instance, I remember that Friedman made some good points about electric companies, but his actual data are blurred together in my mind with his over-long “20 E.C.E.” story. So I remember stuff about car garages that sell cars’ electricity back into the grid as needed—but is that fact, or fiction? Has that technology actually been developed and put into use, or was Friedman extrapolating likely developments in the future? I now feel like I can’t use any of his examples in my own arguments because I can’t always remember if they came from a dataset, an extrapolation, or from pure speculation. I don’t want to accidentally suggest that someone try out a “Green Friends and Family Plan” if it doesn’t actually exist yet! I think this is unfortunate, because I know Friedman did his homework and I’m pretty sure his data is good—but if I can’t remember what that data is, or separate it from speculation, I can’t use it to convince other people, and it loses its persuasive power.