DIG 245: Group 1, Post 1

Here is a link to my web design blog where you can find our post on the readings from Tuesday, August 29th: jeevanswebdesign.com

Data Culture: Group 5, Post 1

The complexity of our everyday life poses an unlimited number of questions to humans who are trying to navigate their realities. In order to make sense out of the complexity that surrounds us on any given day, we started to record the ever-present information of our realities in form of data – providing invisible clues to help us to make sense out of our realities. Data has also changed the way in which we record history, with the creation of the “timeline”, such as in the A New Chart of History and A Chart of Biography.

 

It is fascinating how the digital revolution, propelled by databases and data-processing machines, completely changed the nature of human society. Nowadays, the internet serves as a social space that entirely disregards geographical separation and has the ability to foster human values rather than local values, which effortlessly transcend borders, cultures and even languages. Hence, it is apparent that the quest for greater amounts of data has only just begun. This is especially clear in Stephen Fortune’s “A Brief History of Databases” with his discussion of increasing transaction volume data from online commerce. As Fortune asks, will the amount of data continue to grow to a point that a shift to NoSQL architecture would be necessary? Will the amount of data one day become too great for any system of databases to hold?

 

More data allows for more sophisticated data-processing, which in turn creates an increasingly automated society. With data being in tremendously high demand, we can expect data-processing machines to follow suit in their level of sophistication. The basic idea of a machine that can perform multiple tasks has been around since the mid 1800’s, but the first computers were not created until much later. From 1910 to the mid-1960’s, tabulators and punch cards used to be the state-of-the-art technology. Due to their (at that time) efficiency in storing information and effectiveness in navigating our realities, the demand for more complex databases and machines has since skyrocketed. We cannot necessarily, therefore, expect this trend to stop anytime soon. Data has made tabulators expendable and could continue to grow to different sectors, including new developments like: self-driving Ubers, grocery delivering drones, and IBM’s Watson.

 

 

Page 23 of “Data Before The Fact” – Daniel Rosenberg