Alternative beginnings

New Year begins on January 1st . But that’s just half of the story! Many students and employees at Tilburg University celebrate a new beginning on January 28th: that’s the Chinese New Year. So, for those among us who have been not keeping the New Year’s resolutions made just some weeks ago, there is still some hope! As my ‘confidential source’ convincingly said when she announced me the coming Year of the Rooster: ‘Don’t give up: February is the New January!’

This post is about trends and resolutions.

‘ALTERNATIVE … BEGINNINGS’

About a century and a half ago, it was said that ‘Man is what he eats’. In the past few years, it seems that a growing number of studies are interested in exploring an alternative version of that motto: ‘Man is what he searches for’.

We are getting familiar with new tools of collective rewind. For example, the ‘Year in search’ proposed by Google allows getting access to the list of the most-searched topics and words during the year. What’s intriguing about this retrospective look on our search is that the resulting trends accurately reflect the major events that occurred in the world (or, it is better to say, the major events discussed in the media).

Our search history is a gold mine of information: it can provide us access to the sum of data about who we are, and what we are doing. Sometimes we may get really surprised when we see our reflection in the glass: maybe, we are not the informed and educated citizens we believed to be! After all, it seems that, in certain situations, we can even go and vote first and, then, go and look later at what that ballot was for.

But, luckily, it seems that we are still informed enough to detect how some buzzwords can cover up lies … some days ago, for example, the internet searches react like antibodies to the phrase ‘alternative facts’ used by President Trump’s counselor.

Each time has its own oracles. The Roman oracles observed the flight of birds … the new ones observe the flow of data. And we have learnt that not all the new techniques of making predictions by monitoring spikes in searches turn out to be correct: see the Google Flu case, for example.

But, I must admit that I have succumbed as well to the temptation to test the modern oracle of Google Trends … I asked: ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, what’s the best period to wish for us all?’ I customized my search to detect when, during the last four years, the lookups for ‘RESOLUTIONS’ have increased. What I got was the following graph:

The look-ups for ‘resolutions’ increase around December 23 of each year and, then, decrease around January 26. The highest peak is always around January 1. The outcome for me was not so surprising. I was actually expecting that, when a new year begins, we all share the desire to set new goals and to commit to better ourselves.

But I also realized that, in the chart, there was no answer to the question that had really inspired my search. Looking at the chart, I was not able to find out whether or not we have been able to honour our commitments year after year! The downward curve signals that around the last week of January we seem to lose interest in the resolutions we made just some weeks before. But does this mean that our short-term interest is too weak to grant results? And then, if this is the case, why do we keep the habit to make resolutions again, every New Year?

I could have written a post about New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of this month. Surely, that timing would have fit the trend better. However, I still think that trends are just half of the story! Trends can tell us where we are, but not where we want to go. So, I decided to go off the charts: January 28th is the Lunar New Year … we are still in time to renew our wishes and to make new ones.

I hope that, next year, our reflection in the glass will be less gloomy than the one we found out in the Word of the Year 2016…

Word of the Year according to Oxford-dictionaries:

Word of the Year according to dictionary.com: