"an incomprehensible number of zeros" Every Datum Tells a Story

But the era of storytelling was overtaken by the era of information, a wholly new mode of communication revolving around facts, rather than experience.

Every Datum Tells a Story by Mark P. Mills and M. Anthony Mills, City Journal 29 June 2014

MARK P. MILLS AND M. ANTHONY MILLS

The dawning of the age of meta-information

29 June 2014

Every generation has its defining technology, and every decade, it seems, needs a label. The sixties were the Space Age, the nineties the Internet Age. The seventies and eighties saw the computer revolution. The decade just passed may come to be known as the Facebook Decade or the Smartphone Era. Without the benefit of hindsight, it’s not always apparent what a new technology will mean or how it will change the way we live. That’s especially true for the period we’ve just entered, which may one day be known as the Age of Big Data, the Dawn of the Cloud, or even, in Cisco’s formulation, the Zettabyte Era.

The zetta prefix denotes an incomprehensible number of zeros: a billion trillion of them. Because bytes measure the microscopic currency of computers and communications systems, such numbers say a lot about the scale of the hardware infrastructure underlying our modern information technology. But counting bytes today is like counting, in 1914, the comparable number of drops of ink used to form the letters in print circulation. It’s impressive but not terribly useful.

Still, computer and software experts gather at conferences to talk about how big and unprecedented the numbers are, how the concept of “big data” changes everything. …

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