The Unintended Consequences of Technology

CHAPTER 3Data: What Is the Data Industrial Complex?

The world is one giant big data cocktail! But what exactly is big data?

Big data is a term used in computing to refer to extremely large data sets that are analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. Almost all big technology companies are investing heavily in managing and maintaining big data. The massive volumes of data can be used to address business problems, new business opportunities, and understand you (the customer) very well. But how has data creation, curation, collection, computation, and cleansing evolved over time?

THE HISTORY OF DATA

Data is part of the fabric of life and society, and has been since the beginning of time. What has evolved is the story detailing data collection, storage, and processing. It's said that knowledge is power. Well, data is knowledge. In this chapter, we explore the power that our data holds.

It's (perhaps) possible to trace the history of data back to the very ancient world. The Ishango bone was a notched baboon bone tool dating to around 19,000 BCE. It's thought to have acted as a tally stick. So it could be speculated that the Ishango bone represents an incredibly early instance of data collection and storage. That is, those methodical bone scratches could be the first documented record of humans logging numerical information for later use.

Around the third millennium BCE, writing started to evolve, ...