Let’s “Meta” one More Time

The New York Times Magazine had a “Riff” on Meta, called “Welcome to the Age of Heavy Meta” by Devon McCann Jackson (aka David Zweig).  A highly recommended read.  He says it so much more elegantly than I did in my riff, “Big Data, Megatrends and Meta Trends” in this blog back in July. The article’s subtitle sums it up perfectly: “Somewhere between Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” and “Family Guy”, the world “meta” became shorthand for wry knowingness.  But the advent of metadata shows us just how much – and how little – we truly know.”  

Big Data an Economic Dud?

James Glanz of the The New York Times asks the question if Big Data is overrated as the big new diver to spur the economy in an article from August 17th: Is Big Data an Economic Big Dud?

Big Data has been called the "new oil", a new asset group, but I agree with the article that we're talking about lateral shift of economic spending, not real growth. As Glanz points out as far as retail is concerned the digital world is replacing the physical one so there's no economic growth per se, but a shift. 

Big Data

Big Data has been holding my attention for a while, as it might by now be obvious. I was lucky enough to accompany a group of C-level executives from Germany on an East Coast trip to industry leaders in Big Data to gain a glimpse at the cutting edge this spring. 

 

The question I think is less, what Big Data is, but where Big Data is, because it’s everywhere, literally.  Think George Orwell’s 1984 on steroids times infinity plus one. Big Data is the information the NSA requested from Verizon, Big Data is the advertising pushed to your screen after doing research for blue socks. You get to see are blue socks for the next few days, until your next search and then you see LED light bulbs everywhere. Big Data is all the information we output all the time with the many devices we use and the endless apps on them. Keep a training log online? Play solitaire on your iPhone? Upload your photos with geo-tagging, as default, courtesy of your camera? Your metro card? Your built-in car GPS? And that’s just the simplest of lists from our consumer world.  

Big Data, Megatrends and Meta Trends

We use the word megatrend so often today; it’s a trend all of its own, it has passed from neologism, to buzzword, to vernacular. I was however curious in my digging around in what I believe to be the most talked about megatrend today: Big Data, what the commonly understood definitions of mega- and meta-trends would be. I wrote about megatrends a few months back. 

I understand meta as a prefix to be referencing a higher hierarchy, or description of the word it’s affixed too (it also happens to be my sisters nick name – just in case you were wondering).  Meta-linguistics would be the science about linguistics rather than the science of linguistics. Metadata would be a definition or description of data.