What Big Data Means For Big Cities
Sometimes the most powerful and transformative technologies emerge by accident, an unintended consequence of other developments. When this happens, the scope and power of the new technology can't be fully appreciated until after we have embedded it in our culture.
Big Data is all that and much, much more.
By now we all recognize the many revolutions of the Internet. But who could have known back in the 1960s that getting a few hulking mainframe computers to swap digital spit could lead to the Facebooked/Googled/e-banking/YouTubed world we inhabit today? But as head spinning as it all has been, simmering within the Internet upheaval bubbles another possibility that has slowly been taking shape. For now, it's called Big Data. If it lives up to its promise (or peril), it will rework the architecture of human experience in ways we simply cannot imagine.
And because our urban centers have always been engines of information, there is likely no nexus of human culture more susceptible to Big Data's hurricane winds than Big Cities.
By now, of course, you may be wondering if there's really something going on or if Big Data is just this year's overheated hype. The answer to that question is a definitive NOT HYPE and the reason can be summed up in two words: Digital Breadcrumbs.
For years now we have all been dropping digital breadcrumbs — electronic markers in 1s and 0s — spread across the wired world. From cell-phone locations to grocery store shopping choices to Facebook posts, we are leaving a record of our life that is out there to be followed by anyone with the resources and the time.
And it's not just us.
Every function of our culture is generating reams of numbers that flow into the data sphere: from the monthly billing records of public utilities to the traffic data recorded by municipal street sensors, it's all getting recorded and most of it is getting electronically archived.
If you want a physical representation of Big Data, consider this: to store all the information humanity created in just one year you'd need 80 billion 16-GB iPhones. That's enough iPhones to create a ring circling the Earth 100 times.
The premise of Big Data is deceptively simple: hidden in all that information lies a hyper-resolution map of the world's behavior in space and time. It's a representation of human life and the natural world with a fidelity we have never had before. Think of those movies where a character can stop time and then walk around poking at people and objects frozen in action. Now give that character X-ray microscopic eyes and you begin to get a feel for what Big Data allows.
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