exo : blah

Of all the things that the increasing move to digital allows one of the most pervasive is counting. Websites count how many people visit, they count which articles are popular, how many people like things, how many people buy things. They also count how long people spend on the website, how often they come back in a month, how long they spend on individual pages. They count everything they can.

Once they've counted they can use those numbers to work out what's popular, what sort of headlines result in more people reading an article, or at least clicking through to it or linking to it. That information is then used to tailor the content of the site, to decide what to focus on and how to present it in order to increase the numbers. The sophisticated sites present the same content slightly differently to different people and compare the numbers. If it's an online shop you can count people at each step in the process of buying something to see where those that don't buy stop, and then use that to try and move people further through the process. It's all terribly useful for improving your site.

And it provokes a sense of unease in me.

Unease at the way things are reduced to the countable, at the use of numbers to justify doing things, unease at how it makes things into a puzzle to solve.

All this analysis is useful and you can learn a great deal about how people use your site but I worry about what feels to me like the increasing primacy of numbers in making decisions. I worry that not only are we relying on numbers too much, we're trying to count things that can't be and making judgements based on those numbers. Mostly I worry that all this counting only answers the small questions but encourages to concentrate on them because they can be answered.