Infographics, Nicotine, and New Years Eve

There’s an expression attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain that goes: “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” And in modern life there’s rarely a day that goes by where we don’t hear an editorialized statistic being used to motivate us to do something we don’t want to do. Whether it is spending money, voting for some man or woman running for office, or just remembering to keep waiting, listening, or looking. It seems as if no statistics really matter, but they do because you have control over what you do after you’re exposed to them.

An infographic is a visual where the shape or size of a data source itself correlates with the quantity of data, but it exists for entertainment purposes as well as educational purposes. A graph is used for scientific reference, but graphs have become misused, standardized, misused, and standardized again since the dawn of algebra… This spin cycle of making graphs according to a rigid dogma, then having points docked for following it by your next teacher is enough to make anyone drop out of school and join the circus. But! the fact is that communicating well is indistinguishable from art. There’s a reason chemistry degrees and photography degrees come from the same schools. Communicating efficiently is indistinguishable from art, he repeats incredulously. The infographic is a way of communicating a lot of information about facts that does not purport to contain only facts. Oddly and ironically refreshing? You bet.

But the infographic isn’t a vestigial toe of the hard sciences, it is an appendage we’ve evolved from globalization, the enormity of industrial trends, and the grandiose dryfall of the world being painted with standardized LED screens, newspapers, and banner ads. In short, infographics are harder to make than sentences or simple graphs, so they are, therefore, more elaborate forms of bullshit. They’re like memes for people with graduate degrees.

In an infographic, one could make a line that symbolizes the number of people doing a certain activity and the thickness of the line could have one pixel correspond to 100 people doing that activity, but instead of the line going up or down, the line could then thin down to 1 pixel with regards to the bottom axis (note that this is always the time scale and is a vestigial toe of the hard sciences.) Here’s what you need to know before looking at this graph the right way and only then will you see why it’s on a public health blog: some things in life are just hard to articulate.

A plot of the frequency of people searching for the term “quit smoking” showing a spike at new years at least as large as the frequency of people searching for the term “quit smoking” every single day.

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Take these four things from this image: less and less people are smoking, people resolve to quit smoking at New Years, there is a desire within every smoker to quit that lays dormant until inspiration strikes, and there must be more to quitting than making a resolution between yourself and Google, so call today to get free nicotine patches and counseling.