Data Drives the World. You Need to Understand It
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We are living in the greatest information revolution in human history, even greater than the printing press. It’s estimated that 1.7 MB of data are created every second for every person on earth—the same amount of data needed to store an 850 page book, per second. Every day, more than 300 billion emails are sent, and Google processes around 6 billion requests. Every minute, YouTube watchers consume over 4 million videos. All told, some 2.5 exabytes of data is generated every day. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes, the equivalent to 3000 times the content of the Library of Congress. No wonder IBM reported that 90% of all the data in the history of the world was generated between 2010 and 2012, when social media began to take off.
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And these numbers are growing exponentially, as you might expect when more than 6 billion people hold in their hand the most powerful information engine in human history. Today, scientists estimate that data will be consumed at a compound annual growth rate of 23% between now and 2025. Every swipe, search, text, keystroke, click, like and purchase creates more data. (And we haven’t even factored in The Internet of Things!) What’s more, the same machines that create all this information give us access to it: every person with a smart phone can access more information than anyone in history.
And yet.
And yet a 2012 study showed less trust in science and facts than in the days before the Internet. Some may be overwhelmed, while some lack the basic skills to benefit from this information revolution: 43 million Americans have low literacy skills, and 8.4 million are classified as functionally illiterate. Average reading proficiency scores across the country have declined in the last ten years. That might begin to explain why, in the face of a worldwide pandemic, millions of people seem not to understand—or trust—the tenets of modern science. Another explanation surely is the tsunami of disinformation…
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Source : time
