Summary
Laurie Taylor explores the increasing use of metrics across diverse aspects of our lives.
From education to healthcare, charities to policing, we are are target-driven society which places a heavy emphasis on measuring, arguably at times at the expense of individual professional expertise.
Laurie is joined by Jerry Muller, Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., who asserts in his book, The Tyranny of Metrics, that we are fixated by metrics, to the extent to which we risk compromising the quality of our lives and most important institutions. He is also joined by Btihaj Ajana, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, who, in the introduction to the book, Metric Culture - Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices, explains the concept of the 'Quantified Self Movement' - whose philosophy is 'self-knowledge through numbers'.
With such a plethora of personal information about ourselves being generated daily are we complicit in creating a culture of surveillance with the blurring of boundaries between the private and public? Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge, joins the discussion. Revised repeat.
Producer Natalia Fernandez
Transcript
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| 0:47.0 | Whenever I was busy marking final examinations at your university |
| 0:51.6 | I'd find myself wishing for a simpler method of assessment. |
| 0:55.0 | I mean, how refreshing it would be to line up the candidates in a row and throw starter questions at them |
| 1:02.0 | in the manner of University Challenge rather than |
| 1:04.4 | somehow having to arrive at a mark between naught and 100. I mean was the |
| 1:10.0 | script in front of me worth a borderline first, a 69 instead of, say, 68, which firmly |
| 1:16.5 | signaled a solid up a second. |
| 1:19.5 | If I did finally settle on 69, would I then become involved in one of those almost interminable senior common room discussions |
| 1:27.0 | with an academic co-marker who consider the paper worth a mere 62. |
| 1:34.5 | The outcome would of course be critical. |
| 1:37.2 | Once two examiners had agreed upon a score for an individual paper, that mark was set in |
| 1:42.3 | stone. Candidate A simply was a solid 67, or it died in the wall, |
| 1:48.0 | 74, and that was it. |
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