What is it in the photo?
Zoom in a bit closer.
It is 426000 old cell phones Americans discard every day. The photo created by Artist Chris Jordan in his Running the Number Series showing at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. Chris Jordan try to give a new perspective of American statistics in this series by giving the number a visual meaning.
I admire his effort to increasing the public awareness of many social issues through his creative artwork. However, just like plain old statistic on paper can lie, statistic represent in photos can also lie. Chris twists the reality to deliver the stunting visual effect, just impress the audience without giving any meaningful interpretation of the statistics. He pick an arbitrarily very very large number to aggregate the statistic for his photos. Yet he forgot a simple fact, US has over 3 billion population. A photo full of old cell phones looks scary, but you do the math, it is only one new cell phone per person every two years, which is quite reasonable.
Here is my art work depicts half a cell phone, equal to the number of cell phones retired per person in the US every year.
.
See, old cell phone is not that scary after all if you represent the statistic in the right way.
Joining a book club is one of the best way to force yourself to finish a book, especially those difficult to read non-fictions not writing with the general public in mind. It is like taking a distant course with weekly assigned readings and follow up discussion. Fellow book club members makes you feel good that you are not reading alone. The book club reads only one or two chapters each week. The pace is just right, not too fast nor not too slow, or you won’t have time to absorb the materials. You can’t read too many pages of those non-fiction difficult title in one sitting anyways or you will start falling asleep. Reading with a book club gives you discipline to actually finish the book.