Data Boy

We leak, diffuse, effuse, scream, ponder and emote our feelings and opinions across the Web, tearing through social networking, texting and Tweeting across the ether, laying footprints and personal information “out there” for all (or way too many) to see. Privacy has become a political slogan and for most a distant memory. Blackmailers are getting too much inside information, but then finding the value of the secret decreased because the Web is already disseminating that “private information” anyway. Data scraping and trolling have become honorable professions, and as privacy advocates and those with deep concern about potentially pernicious connective tissue to children fight back, macro and micro-information gathering seems to drive a very big industry.

But macro-trends have become yet another forecaster of everything from divorce rates to stock market performance. Those with the ability to identify these trends, in as close to real time as possible, have been able to make projections that generate hard and immediately positive financial results to the savvy investors who have access to that information. Take for example a company that tracks Twitter: “From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace.

“The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short… Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals, companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news faster than traditional investment approaches.” Washington Post, June 6^th.

Think of all the data being generated by Google and Facebook as well: “The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM.” The Post. A quintillion, according to thefreedictionary.com, is “the number… one followed by 18 zeros (10¹⁸).” I have no concept for what that really means, but they call that morass of information “Big Data.” Accessing that information, sorting it and making sense of the flow is complex and not for the faint of heart. While micro-tracking is on everybody’s mind – ever wonder why ads appear on your Google homepage that seem to reflect some of the flow of your recent emails or why trackers can tell you are getting a divorce (bad for credit ratings) just by how you use your credit card – there are prodigious analyzers of prodigious information.

Businesses develop their strategies, governments prepared for contingencies and social thinkers plan for the future using this endless data flow: “While the human brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and other expressions of daily life.” The Post. Perhaps that movie, I Know What You Did Last Summer, might spawn a sequel: I Know What You Are Doing Every Minute of Every Day.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if none of this bothers you, undoubtedly, you are under 30!