There are typically one of two things that come to mind when you hear the word split — it’s either that thriller movie about the man with 26 personalities, or a delicious and decadent sweet treat composed of one banana split down the middle and blanketed with hot fudge, ice cream, and cherries.
If it’s neither of those things, then it’s one of a dozen other meanings the English speaking world has assigned to this combination of letters. In a slanged connotation, split can mean to abruptly leave an event, location, or interaction. In a more general sense, it means divided. Parts of a former whole torn apart. You can split from your partner or significant other. You can split a log of wood with an axe. You can try and do a split in a drunken stupor and injure your groin irrevocably. Regardless, whenever split is applied in a human or social context, more often than not it is associated with harm.
I grew up as a suburban-bred New Yorker with a split cultural identity. My parents left their home country of India to settle in a foreign land. They were introduced relatively young, married relatively quickly, and had three children, all born in this new and foreign country. Those young children — my sisters and I — went through the suburban white Long Island Catholic school system. Like sponges, we absorbed accents, behavior, customs, humor — from two worlds. Toeing the line between these two worlds allowed me to develop in a way that was hyper-conscious and ultra sensitive to just about everything — American and Western stereotypes about India and Indians, the inevitable and ongoing internal culture clash within my own family, but most importantly, my own desires, objectives, and potential.
People have been inheriting, constructing, and passing down narratives since the dawn of time. Stories allow us to feel a sense of meaning and control over our world, which can oftentimes feel chaotic, random, and confusing. The narrative I constructed for my own identity for years was one of division- a man, split, never at home, even when at home. Yet in recent years, I’ve come to realize that this split might not be a split after all, but rather a synergistic confluence of lived experience, culture, and “Jensen-ness”. My young adulthood, set on a foundation of my multiple identities, has been centered around the synthesis of emotion and information into the story of me today — a social-impact minded technologist who now yearns to foray into a new world, one of stories yet untold.
Information is one of the most powerful tools mankind has at its disposal, and in today’s climate of rampant misinformation, we’ve seen the tool become a reality-distorting poison-tipped weapon. Luckily, I believe there are ways to return to the halcyon days of truth and human-centered narrative design, and it all begins with a product-centric approach to information.
Just as I’ve learned to view my own identity as a harmonious union of cultures, rather than a split, I’ve begun to incorporate that framing in my intellectual and professional pursuits. As Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman theorized in his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” our brains operate in a dichotomy. His “dual process theory of thought” states that our “System 1” brain is automatic, rapid, emotional, unconscious, and intuitive, whereas our “System 2” brain is conscious, slow, and deliberative. And yet, these two systems are not split — they don’t correspond to a physical part of your brain, and one does not exist without the other. When you load a webpage, your System 1 processes register the style components that stand out — bright colors, shapes, bold typography, images, etc. This is automatic. Once the page loads and your eyes focus, your logical, high effort System 2 processes guide your understanding and absorption of the information that is being presented. Internalizing this has made me a better designer of products in technology.
Technology serves to ground and enhance every sector, including and especially the landscape of information design and dissemination. Whether that product is a mobile application used by health workers in India to improve maternal and child health outcomes, or whether it’s a journalistic investigation into how governments are or are not tackling race relations, climate change, or COVID-19, the logic holds true- the product approach must be systematic, methodical, logical, and must, above all, hold the interest of the audience / user / consumer in the highest esteem. To me, this can take many forms- leveraging deep data mining and analysis to identify and ship under-reported, highly impactful stories, defending democracy and combating fake news through the development of fact checking tools and software, or developing beautiful, easily digestible data visualizations.
The world is a series of if / else conditional statements, shaped entropically by each individual’s choices. It’s an endless matrix of scenarios and edge cases. It’s a tidal wave of information, stories, and emotion. I want to harness, own, and manage each of those streams, and continue to grow as a technologist — a a cache that is both unified and split.
