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, 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.