yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Birth of Datafication


2m read
·Nov 4, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

Datafication refers to the fact that we're looking at more aspects of life that we never actually understood as being informational before and finding out that, in fact, there's an informational quality to it that we can render into a data format.

So what we're seeing with social media companies is they're actually datafying aspects of the life that we never really saw that could be datafied. For example, Facebook datafies our friendships, Twitter datafies our whispers, or maybe our stray thoughts, and LinkedIn datafies our professional context.

More and more, we're seeing that we're able to take the daily interactions of living things that we never really saw that could be rendered into a data format, and we're putting them into data formats now.

What does this mean in the big picture? The fact is we're just at the outset of the Big Data era, so we're going to find out. But you can just use your imagination and think of some of the extraordinary uses. One way that we're doing it is looking at who contacts whom on Twitter and whose followers are, and we're able to identify that, and we've never known this before.

Subpopulations exist that are either immunized for the flu or are not. Now, it's a public health issue. The whole point of vaccinations is that you take a broad population, you vaccinate many but not all, and everyone is covered.

What we've just now learned with Twitter is that this idea of herd immunity might not be the case because there are whole subgroups of the population that all don't get vaccinated, yet they all hang out together, they do virtually, and we're seeing that those virtual ties are also physical ties.

I want to stress this; it sounds like it might be an intuitive thing. It's not! It sounds like this might just be a nice thing to know—it's deadly important, it's very serious, and it took data relationships and interactions to learn it.

So when you think about it in the grand scheme, what Big Data means is we are able to learn things about ourselves at the population level, at a huge scale, that we never could in the past. So, lots of different disciplines, in one case sociology, totally gets upended because in the past, you ran small studies on small groups. Now, you're looking at it on a population scale size...

More Articles

View All
When the functions of money break down: Hyperinflation | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy
So in the last video, I was talking about various functions of money. You know, the first was that it’s a medium of exchange. If you want to trade for things, typically you give someone money, and they give you the thing, rather than trying to barter, tra…
How to be more disciplined (animated short story)
Oh, meet Lucas. He’s a young man about to enter college. He’s had a difficult life growing up with his only parent, his mother, and his younger sister. Due to his difficulties in facing his adversities, he’s lived a fairly unhealthy life and constantly in…
Desire Is a Contract You Make to Be Unhappy
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. You start becoming disturbed because you want something, and then you work really hard to get that thing. You’re miserable in the meantime, and then when you get that t…
Touring a unique terraced backyard farm | Farm Dreams
Let’s head up the hill and you can see kind of the other areas of the farm. Okay, oh, carrots! Yep, these carrots are pretty close to ready. Yeah, yeah, wow! Everything looks so incredible from up here too. It’s like this is where I feel like I would hang…
How to Focus to Change Your Brain
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. [upbeat music] My name is Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. This podcast is sepa…
Joel Greenblatt on How to Achieve a 40% Return a Year
So if you believe what Ben Graham said, that this horizontal line is fair value, and this wavy line around that horizontal line are stock prices, and you have a disciplined process to buy perhaps more than your fair share when they’re below the line, and …