No doubt the digital age is ruled by data. We give off bits of data with every act in digital media, from paying for things with a credit card to using a mobile phone to doing an Internet search. That’s led to the buzzword du jour: Big Data. Yet not everyone is buying into Big Data. Alan Mitchell, strategy director at consultancy Ctrl-Shift, thinks the term is misplaced because there’s not all that new in how we’re gleaning insights from data — and the real challenges of information flows aren’t being addressed.
Even with the vast amounts of data it deals in, it’s actually only skimming the surface of a deep sea of computation. There are more connections between the neurons in the brain of the average Joe than there are atoms in the universe (or so I am told). Big Data doesn’t touch what’s going on in peoples’ heads – their motivations, their intentions, their goals, priorities and so on. All it does is collect after-the-event data about what they do once they turn these thoughts and feelings into actions – and then it’s only those actions which register on some particular data gathering system. So Big Data never goes to the source – the fountainhead of Really Big and Important Data: human beings and what they want to do right now, or plan to do in the future.
Read Michell’s full post on the Ctrl-Shift blog.
More in Media
WTF is headless browsing, and how are AI agents fueling it?
AI agents are putting headless browsing back in the spotlight. For media companies, that raises questions: How much traffic is real vs. automated?
How People Inc. is prioritizing traffic and revenue diversification to prepare for AI era
People Inc is preparing for AI’s impact on search and content discovery by focusing on traffic and revenue diversification and direct to consumer relationships.
One year in, Business Insider’s AI onsite search is boosting engagement
Although Business Insider’s AI search tool is currently only used by roughly one percent of Business Insider’s readership, it has significantly increased the engagement of those who do use the tool, with click-through to articles increasing by 50 percent since October.