The Best TED Talks About Pop Culture Analytics

By: Anna Cave

Data can be fun, and here's a few TED Talks about analytics in pop culture to show you how.

How I hacked online dating | Amy Webb | 2013 | 17:15
Amy Webb discusses how she used data from dating sites to (spoiler alert) find her husband. Dating sites all have their algorithms, but they aren't perfect. Feeling behind on her life plan, Webb thought about how she could develop her own system of data points based on what was important for her in a future husband. She developed a point system to rank each quality that was important to her and decided to only go on dates with men who broke the threshold until she ended up meeting the man she would marry. Affective? Yes. Slightly creepy? Absolutely. I wouldn't necessarily recommend trying this out, but it's very interesting to see Webb put the data in dating.

Your social media "likes" expose more than you think | Jennifer Golbeck | 2013 | 9:42
What you like on social media can reveal information about you in the most unexpected ways. Everything we do is tracked, which Jennifer Golbeck says may not be ethical, but it is used to determine what kind of person we may be based on what we search and like. Golbeck discusses examples that range from pregnancy announcements to parents to liking fries as a measure of intelligence, and ties it all up by suggesting how we can regain power over our own data.

The complex relationship between data and design in UX | Rochelle King | 2014 | 11:10
Ever wonder why your Spotify looks the way it does? Rochelle King, a senior designer at Spotify discusses how and why the app's layout went from light to dark mode and the data-driven reason behind it. She discusses where data and design meet, and how the two work together to formulate a great platform

How to use data to make a hit TV show | Sebastian Wernicke | 2016 | 12:18
Sebastian Wernicke explains that data can help us make decisions, but not completely. Data can do a lot for us, but sometimes it can get things wrong. Data can take apart and analyze the bits and pieces of something, but it can't necessarily put it back together. In order to make the best use of your data and get exceptional results, the data needs to be used as a tool and your brain needs to put it the rest together.

How Netflix changed entertainment— and where it's headed | Reed Hastings | 2018 | 20:44
Netflix really changed the way they approached their data a few years back. Originally, they would ask consumers to rate movies on their platform, but they found that user's aspirational values didn't match up with the values revealed by their consumption patterns. Instead of being accurately reflective over the type of content they consumed, like guilty pleasures, consumers rated movies they were "supposed" to like much higher. After Netflix realized this, they adjusted their algorithm to show consumers content that they actually wanted to watch, as well as some things that were a little out of their comfort zone to try and vary the diet of content.