Experience vs. Data: Consuming Mark Zuckerberg as Data

One day last month, a dazzling sunny day in Paris, I faced a choice: Do I spend my last afternoon in a crowded tent listening to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or do I dash across the river from the Tuileries and make a quick visit to the Musee d’Orsay (below)?

I ended up bagging Zuckerberg. The decision boiled down to a question of experience vs. data. The walk across central Paris to the museum would be an experience. What I would learn from Mark Zuckerberg, for the most part, would be data, and I could just as easily consume it, either in writing or (far less likely) video whenever I wanted.

I find that I make these data vs. experience decisions regularly. And some of them are changing. Baseball, for example. I usually consume it as a data stream, following pitches on my phone or computer as I talk to my wife (she doesn’t like it), watch TV or barbecue a fish. The experience of conversation is often reduced to data, with text messages as the most basic. Of course, since my business involves selling pages and pages of data, I shouldn’t put it down. But the information that comes in from our body, through experience, is the richest of our data channels–especially on a sunny day in Paris.