A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
Tell the truth now! How many pictures do you have on your disk drive? When was the last time you actually looked at most of them? How many files do you have in your documents (and other) folders that you haven’t opened in the last year? How many USB Flash Drives do you have filled with stuff you don’t ever use?
In this short article, I’m not going to tell you how to clean up those messes. I’m just going to tell you why I think we are getting “over‑datafied”. No you won’t find “over-datified” in the dictionary. I made it up, but maybe it should be!
In this modern day and age, we are constantly being tracked. Information about our habits are being stored on web servers everywhere. Law enforcement agencies, business and many other organizations keep track of where we are, what we do and what we buy. We hear almost daily about the potential harm that may befall us because of all the data mining. For the most part, I don’t think that really happens very much.
What does happen is the data is often used to better our lives. Isn’t it nice to just say, “OK Google” and almost immediately find out anything you might want to know. I personally like it when my pocket computer beeps and tells me that it is time to leave if I don’t want to be late for a club meeting. I like the fact that the library program suggests books that I might enjoy to reading. In fact, that is how data mining is supposed to work. We share information about ourselves and that information is used to make our lives better.
The problem is that I think we are getting to the point where there is just too much data. There are thousands of apps you can download to your phone that access many data bases. Do we really need to know where all the bathrooms within fifty miles are? Is it necessary to keep track of how much coffee is left in the pot?
You can search the WWW and find a database for anything and everything. We’re definitely “over‑datafied” when we can find out that women blink more than men, that Americans eat more than 100 acres of pizza every day, Vermont has more cows than people or that ingrown toenails are hereditary.
You can’t get through the day without being inundated with useless data. Just listen to the nightly news. Twenty-eight percent of the stories have a percentage fact in the story. Oh well! I guess there is nothing we can do about being “over‑datafied”. Now you’ll have to excuse me while I edit the data charts for next months newsletter.
Thanks for reading.