aron

“We only count what we know to count, and that's strongly determined by where we stand and who we are.

I often hear people say that qualitative research isn't generalizable, by which they mean that they use "sample" that do not have the features necessary to make valid inferences about a known population.

Forget for a minute that most survey samples aren't truly random, that confidence intervals are often not included, and so on.

We're all operating with the kind of bias that makes it hard to find hay in the haystack. We're biased towards things that are already legible to us. Statistical methods make a virtue of that.

Qualitative research helps us to de-center our concepts, to expand our understanding of the frameworks and schema that operate in lesser examined corners of life.

Even numbers aren't simply a sequence of digits, but a continuum of rationality and irrationality, with the latter making up the grand majority.

Going Further is about changing your stance in ways that challenge our sense of what counts.”

Adam Talkington

Head of Ethnography at Further&Further

we USED to have communities without communication. NOWADAYS we have communication without community. 

We need a new definition of scale that is not about the production volumes of a material but the proliferation and exchange of knowledge. From scaling up to scaling out – or perhaps from scaling up to skilling up.  

The landscape of information online is time-independent yet observer-relative. My interaction with content is shaped by my unique digital context – my online habits, frequented sites, and chosen links. This reminds me, in an unscientific manner, of Einstein’s relativity, where time and space are relative to the observer's position. The meaning and significance of online information change based on the viewer and their vantage point. No wonder the internet feels like a vast, contentious discussion space, with everything existing in all states and variances simultaneously. In real life, things change over time, but perhaps in the physics of the internet, it's all about the relational dynamics of data, defined by its current network of relationships and connections.

When I post online, I add basic metrics to track views. But I never know the contexts or the viewers. Suddenly, this information exists in multiple states of interpretation and misunderstanding, yet in a seemingly timeless way. It appears in various timelines and communities, creating different contexts and associations by proximity alone. This makes me think of information entanglement, where separate pieces of content, or even fragments, once removed from their original context, become intrinsically linked in the minds of others, existing all at once in myriad forms. The data becomes the medium. Like a quantum particle, understood only in layman's terms, it exists in multiple states of interpretation, misunderstanding, and relevance simultaneously, collapsing into a specific state only upon interaction (viewing, sharing, commenting, etc.).