The phrase is suddenly everywhere, tripping off the tongue in domains from marketing to management to medicine
Newly massive and complex data sets, along with advanced methods of probing them, it is said, are remaking our world
Whether one believes that big data is the key to solving intractable social problems or, instead, the source of new ones say, surveillance at an unprecedentedly intimate scale we surely can agree that careful assessments of the phenomenon are in order
Enter Steve Lohr, a longtime technology reporter for the New York Times
Lohr was investigating big data before it was Big Data, and that experience lends him a somewhat different vantage point on what he calls data-ism (a word coined by his Times colleague David Brooks) from those of other devotees and detractors
His book, Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else, is a dispatch from the field, a chronicle of the present state of big data and the possible future it portends
But first: What is data-ism? Lohr describes it as a transformative way of measuring and seeing, born of improved methods of analyzing data of all kinds, from browsing histories to GPS locations to genomic information
Powerful algorithms, as well as machine-learning software and artificial intelligence technologies that can sense and communicate are at its core
More important, Lohr calls data-ism a point of view, or philosophy, about how decisions will be and perhaps should be made in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment