Understanding data in our daily lives
Data is a collection of observations or facts. Everything starts with data, and it’s all around us. We know that every person on the planet creates 1.7 MB of data every second. Yet, many people are not even aware of all the data around them in their daily lives.
When we talk to people in our everyday lives, they always say, We don’t work with data. We know nothing at all about data. But, let’s look at the facts: data is all around us in the form of numbers, words, pictures, videos, maps, audio files, sensors, music, our phones, and even our wearable devices such as smartwatches and so on. Everything around us gives off data, and we don’t even realize it most of the time. To give you an example, let’s have a look at what kind of data we use when we wake up, as we show in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 – Data in our daily lives
Let’s think about this in terms of how we usually go about our workdays. We set an alarm, which is usually on our phones. When we pick up our phones, we create a movement, or event, and turn off the alarm. One of the next steps is to check the news and social media for information about the pandemic. This will help us get ready for the day to come. We’ll also check the weather to see what it looks like and make sure we’re wearing the right clothes for the day. We say good morning to Alexa or our Google home smart devices, and maybe we have a fancy coffeemaker that makes us a nice cup of coffee on its own. We might even be able to turn on the lights with an app on our phones. During coffee and breakfast, we check the traffic to decide whether to drive to work or take the bus or train.
Well, all these things or events are data. In fact, we have created a flow of data and don’t even know it, and the story goes on: on the way to work, we can use our phones to check all kinds of things (we are connected to the world). Your social media followers on LinkedIn or Twitter; it’s always fun to see how many people like your posts or replies. Let’s be honest, when a message we post on LinkedIn gets more than 100 likes or has been seen more than 5,000 times, we get excited. When we like something, read an article, or share something on social media, we give information to the companies that make the social media software.
