Author: saduncan

One of the most notable themes that can be identified between pages 102 and 205 of The Circle is hypocrisy.  As Mae continues incorporating herself more and more into the Circle and immersing herself in its culture, it seems that she loses a sense of who she is and what she stands for.  Her interactions with both Francis and Mercer highlight this development.

When LuvLuv was introduced at Dream Friday, Mae was horrified to find herself named publicly as the subject of Francis’ affection during a preview of the new service.  Mae was caught off guard and unprepared for the entire experience.  Ultimately, everyone in the audience was given a detailed look into her life, including her allergies, names of restaurants she frequents, rankings of her favorite foods, movie preferences, favorite locations, and more.  LuvLuv was able to take advantage of the data trail she had been unwittingly leaving for years and turn it into a search engine for people who were interested in knowing about her.  Mae, understandably, is furious and finds herself wondering why Francis couldn’t ask her himself what he wanted to know about her.

One day later, however, Mercer repeats this same question to Mae when he criticizes her work at and association with the Circle.  Mercer take issue with how Mae interacts and communicates with him, essentially unhappy with how she uses social networks to interact, prioritizing online engagement over personal engagement.  He has problems with how the Circle encourages people to participate online in what he understands to be a system that perpetuates untrue information by way of comments, posts and reviews on businesses.  Mae had believed one of the false reviews about his business that was nothing more than rumor, and he is frustrated that she became instantly angry with him instead of asking him personally to verify the claim.  As a reader its frustrating that Mae can’t see the ironic parallel between her own frustration and Mercer’s. She had been wishing for the exact same thing only a day ago, that Francis ask engage with her personally.  Yet when speaking with Mercer, she decries him as an underachiever for being unwilling to participate and buy into the necessity of an online presence.  If she really believed in the importance of this online presence then she would have no issue with LuvLuv.

Maybe its my natural tendency to distrust things I don’t completely understand (in this case the Circle’s incongruous image as an overlord yet extremely convenient and necessary for social life), but Mercer’s interaction with Mae was the first time during my reading that I wasn’t on Mae’s side.  He advocates for an offline lifestyle and refuses to buy into the Circle’s dominance over communication and interaction, which is refreshing after reading about Mae being blindly enthralled by the Circle’s capabilities and technologies.  She refuses to acknowledge the dangerous side of these technologies, even after she is upset about the LuvLuv incident.  Mercer, I think, provides a needed respite from the Circle and its culture, and at least proves that some characters are immune to it’s powerful influence.

In Cartographies of Time, Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton illustrate how easy visualization of data can facilitate a deeper understanding of its meaning.  They take care to introduce and detail multiple different different data recording systems from the last several centuries, explaining the nuances and distinctions among each of them.  The evolution of these charts helps illustrate the relative importance of chronology as a field of study.  It seems, however, that while these charts are immensely detailed and intricate, today’s charts are considerably less so.  A timeline is no longer a revolutionary new method of visualization but more likely a homework assignment for a second grader.  These charts have grown simpler over time, resulting in the standard line graph, something that was previously innovative but is now mundane.  This lack of detail and intricacy points to an argument that Mark Monmonier makes in his book How to Lie with Maps, that exclusion of data and distortion of reality in a chart is necessary to get the most important points across.

A message that both books present is that simplicity is an important aspect of data visualization.  Clarity is key.  Unfortunately, the act of simplifying allows for the possibility of manipulation, which Monmonier details in his accounts of political propaganda maps. Monmonier alludes to the point that simplification of maps is dangerous because people trust them.  Maps are often awarded more authority than they deserve.  Take, for example, the following map:

This map means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and is a frequent source of international tensions.  The 9 dashed line (China’s claimed territory in the South China Sea, in red) was originally published in 1947 by the Koumintang, not the Chinese Communist Party.  In 1949 when the Koumintang fled to Taiwan and the CCP founded the People’s Republic of China, the CCP conveniently adopted this map as their own despite it having been created by the Koumintang, who also maintain claims to the area.  The CCP continues to insist upon their right to claim the entire South China Sea to this day, despite the fact that this violates mutually agreed upon international law.  Some might find this map to be completely legitimate while others find it outrageous.  It stands as an example of how lines drawn on a picture of the earth can represent something so incredibly significant as national sovereignty, and how oversimplification of maps can have potentially dangerous ramifications, especially when those maps carry authority.