As computers, databases and networks come to intermediate almost every aspect of modern human life, the volume of electronic breadcrumbs generated from our daily activities and transactions has exploded. Academic researchers, marketers, governments, and social scientists are all clamoring to record, save and crunch all that information to gain new insights in order to move society, as well as their own interests, forward.
The big questions: How should they responsibly handle it all, and how can they intelligently interpret what they find?
It’s a question that is so profound that it’s going to take decades to figure out, if at all. Some people are calling this next stage of the information revolution the “industrial revolution of data.” The Economist notes, “The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts.”
Indeed, two influential researchers Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research and Kate Crawford of the University of New South Wales in Australia predict that “Big Data,” as the phenomenon is being called, will realign our fundamental assumptions and operations in life, just as Henry Ford’s revolutionary automation of making products “produced a new understanding of labor, the human relationship to work, and society at large.”
“Big Data,” and its implications for society are a big theme among the technorati these days. This week, for example, the theme for the big Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was focused on this very issue. When introducing the conference on Monday, conference co-chair and publisher Tim O’Reilly used a vivid example to illustrate the point: Google’s self-driving car is only able to do what it can do because all the equipment it is decked out with is gathering and processing huge amounts of information to navigate.
From TPM IdeaLab: http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/10/beyond-big-brother-big-data.php?ref=fpc