Just because something can be done doesn’t necessarily make it worth doing, and the ease with which computers make it possible to create cheap and colourful graphics has led to one of the idiocies of the age – that graphics – any graphics – are a good thing, and if you want to improve a publication or television programme, all you have to do is stuff it with graphics bursting with colour, but this mindless fashion does have its dangers not only do graphical representations frequently serve to conceal information that would be immediately obvious in a table (showing on a pie chart a market where Company A has 87% and B, C, D, E and Others share 13% doesn’t do much to highlight changes in the rankings of the also-rans year-on year, even if one of them has increased its share by 200%), but once data is in a chart it tends to be regarded as True; the other night on BBC Television’s Newsnight, there was a brief mention of riots in Mashhad (or Meshet if you prefer), but it had to have an illustration, so the producer helpfully put up a map of Iran which showed Mashhad about where Shiraz actually is, which is similar to showing a map of the United States with New York in Texas, or of Britain with Birmingham identified as Edinburgh…
