With the social media flood comes a torrent of infographics, most of which focus on presentation instead of information. It reminds me of the “mediaglyphics” in yet another Neal Stephenson novel: The Diamond Age. In the futuristic novel, mediaglyphics are used by corrupt governments and broadcast media to inform and entertain a mostly illiterate population. Infographics aren’t much different: they blast the reader with colorful line graphs, maps, and pie charts to present an implicit and oversimplified argument.
I’ve found many of these infographics to be packed with spelling and grammatical errors. For example, try to find the error in this visualization of U.S. debt holders. With enormous font sizes and few words, any spelling or grammatical error really stands out. Such easily identifiable problems make me question the integrity of the statistics (and implicit arguments) these infographics present. Where did the data come from and how reliable are the sources? Many infographics do not provide references, so how am I to know that it isn’t just some ten year old kid making this stuff up? What if multiple sources produce conflicting results? In such cases, it’s almost guaranteed that the infographic creator just picked the result/data that best furthered his or her argument. Lastly, what information is not presented? When reading an infographic, I always wonder if I am seeing the whole picture. With so little information actually presented, I have no doubt that most of these infographics leave out plenty, especially stuff that hurts the creator’s argument.
I admit that infographics pique my interest in a subject to which I haven’t given much thought. However, with minimal content and questionable integrity, they may be no more than chartjunk.
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