How Big Data Is Shaping Our Future

The modern world is data driven, and with the invention of social media, smart phones and other high-end technologies, multitude of data are being created constantly and at an ever-increasing rate. The constant data deluge leads our life to an era of data overload, and the large amount of data make our decision-making abilities fatigue, expensive, and time-consuming. On the other hand, considering the values and perceptiveness, data is precious and extremely valuable, because these data are about our social choices, technical adoptions, psychological behaviors, cultural significance, and economic acceptances, so, with all these attributes, data is coined as 'new currency'. Tech companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook, data itself is their primary product. According to an IBM research, everyday 2.5 quintilian bytes of data are created, and 90 per cent of the all the data has been created in the last two years alone.

In an increasingly complex and connected world, the big data is now a household name for the enterprise, government, academia, and other entities. In the big data ecosystem, data is being created with data devices (cell phone, GPS, video game, cable box, ATM, computer, video surveillance and medical imaging), aggregated by data aggregators (websites, advertising, media archives, credit bureaus, information brokers, and analytic services), collected by data collectors (government, phone, TV, retail, internet and medical), and used or bought by data users or buyers (media, bank, marketers, employers, private investigators or lawyers and law enforcement). So, big data comes from a myriad of sources, and many profit oriented entities may misuse it which is the biggest concern.

Data improves business decision as a business is largely product driven. On the other hand, the data provides various useful insights that impacts our socio-economic structure of our life. For example, a company goes to market and does a survey for its future business set-up, hence it collects so much data from the market to be able to make a better choice. On one hand, the same data it can use to promote its business and understand the economic and purchasing behavior of customers. Customers, by providing data, are being influenced by the products and services the company is going to sell. On the other hand, the same data has an effect on other entities such as competitors, governments, academia, financiers such as banks and financial institutions, and educational institutions. Finally, the society is being influenced by such data ecosystem.

Today tech companies with various technical tools or software such as Hadoop, Natural Language Processing (NLP), SQL, cognitive computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and internet of things, are constantly developing and improving various means to address the storage and processing of big data. Because, storage of data is the first and foremost thing before these data can be used for insight, and With these technical tools, even complex data are easily managed. These data management and its application not only impact our current generation but also shape the future generations in so many ways.

Social media plays a key role in big data as it generates a huge amount of data every moment. Because of the continuous engagement in social media, today, every single social media user creates myriad of data everyday, and in this techno-robotic world, we all want to be smarter and more intelligent. And the concept of 'smart' has been taking a new shape in our lives – be it smart phone or smart cities or smart life, we humans simply love this term. And we all want to take advantage of information in every possible way. With these social media data, both our life and society are being driven by information, data, and technology.

Big data not only shapes our social structures, but also much impacts on our economic life. As companies and other entities use data to take decision, these data also force common people to make choices of buying, investing, borrowing and lending, for example, companies offer discount or promo offers that directly influence customers to spend more, thus improve the financial efficacy. This data driven finance enhances performance through cost optimization and fact-based decision-making. With the insightful analysis and visualization, big data provides fact based decision-making, hence influences our economic life significantly.

The future will, no doubt, be more complex and data will play a more promising role in solving many problems that are being created day by day. Data is the central to the new digital world and privacy has to be dealt with the right balance to avoid all necessary negative impacts that may arise, and should not be the part of the conflicting theme.