🎵 TADA 🎵 A New Look At 'DATA'
It's driving the world - isn't it time you understood it?
Data, one of the People First Pillars, is this week’s topic that links through to my 4-part series recently published by BizCatalyst360.
The series is designed to be;
“Non-technical, hopefully fun, definitely not definitive and absolutely a work in progress.”
In short, an attempt to describe what it is, why it is important and in terms that people (not techies, scientists, statisticians, geeks et al) can understand. Why? Because if you don’t understand what it is and how it is being used against you, then you are in for a shock …
“Failure of society and ‘we the people’ to do this (understand what data is and how it is being used) will mean that the last few hundred years of societal development was for naught and we will return to the feudal states from whence we came.”
Exaggeration? This is what Shoshana Zuboff said in here recent book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’.
“Many scholars have taken to describing these new conditions as neo-feudalism, marked by the consolidation of elite wealth and power far beyond the control of ordinary people and the mechanisms of democratic consent. Piketty calls it a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” a reversion to a premodern society in which one’s life chances depend upon inherited wealth rather than meritocratic achievement.”
🎵‘TADA’ 🎵
… A New Way To Look at ‘DATA’
If you want to start at the beginning and understand why even a date is such a hot bed of debate, misunderstanding, inconsistency and irregularity, then go read D is for Dangerous. If you consider yourself to be someone who is part of the data industry, you might find this a little light .. so move on. But first .. if you think you know that Samuel Morse died on 04/02/72 … you might want to dip in and check your facts.
A is for Articulate provides a little history of how we came to understand the building blocks of the world we live in. Data is not the central theme but is a necessary part of the series because it connects to and provides some context for part 4.
Since 2006, the world has suffered (and I do mean ‘suffered’) through a series of analogies as people have attempted to describe data as the ‘new <choose the analogy dujour>’. T is for Terminating Analogies kills off oil, soil, water and music analogies. Data is not the new anything … it just IS, which I get to in …
Part 4 - A is for Another Way Of Looking At Data - a new way of thinking about data (no spoilers) but does start to explain why Data ‘Lakes’, ‘Warehouses’, ‘Mountains’ and ‘Farms’ are probably the wrong way of approaching the challenge, let alone the thinking!
Separately. What is it with all these ‘natural nouns’ we use for where corporations store all our data that they are ‘harvesting’? (See what I mean).
Is it to make us feel that it is some kind of ‘natural process’, so we shouldn't be worried?
Remember they used to refer to it as data mining, until they realized that ‘asset extraction' businesses were no longer in vogue!
(I think it is another example of Corporate Speak.)Many Thanks For Your Attention and please do forward the email to colleagues, friends and family that want to join us on this journey. It takes more than a village!