If you’re mildly interested in technology, have read any news in the last couple of years
or live in the EU with an active email account, you probably know that data has become a huge
buzz word. The government has data, companies have data, I’ve got data, you’ve got data,
even your dog could have data. We’re talking about digital data, because technically this
is a data storage device but it’s pretty hard to factor that in. Data is everywhere,
in your phones, in your computer and in the sky. This video is data, data all about data
which makes it metadata, which is data that describes other data, and that definition
of metadata, the data that describes other data is also data in itself.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot of data. But before we get to the bottom of how much
let’s talk about how we even measure it.
You’ve probably heard of a kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte but data measurements go way
bigger than this and the scale gets pretty insane. First we need to go smaller, a kilobyte
is a bit bigger than a byte, 9992 bits bigger to be exact. Bits are the smallest measurement
of data and are coded in binary either one or zero, or equivalent to on off. A single
byte, which isn’t written like a mouth bite but instead like a hipster startup wanted
that to make the word “cool”, is made up of 8 bits. And then a kilobyte is made
up of 1,000 of these bytes.
Technically there are multiple types of data measurement. The most widley used in computing
would actually be in kibibytes, mebibytes and gibibytes, long story short, this is called
binary measuring and means and each step is 1024 times larger than the previous. But knowing
that we’re all stupid and that kibibyte sounds like a Pokemon most hard drive makers
instead use decimal measurements like kilobytes, megabytes and so on. This means that each
step is 1000 times the previous one. There are some exceptions and neither are used uniformly
throughout most industries but for the sake of this video and my sanity while I’m researching
it I’m going to stick with the decimal measurement.
So a megabyte is 1000 times a kilobyte and a gigabyte is 1000 times that, as with most
numerical values these can go on forever but for our purposes we can stop at zettabyte.
To understand how insanely big that is, if you started a HD video recording at the start
of the Egyptian empire at around 3150 BC it would still be running now and you’d have
only made a small dent in the capacity. It would continue to film for another 30,000
years.
One of the biggest hurdles to trying to measure data is the speed at which it is created and
the acceleration of this creation. In the last two years alone we have created 90% of
all of the data in the entire history of the planet.
One of the big drivers in this rapid data creation are the increasing numbers of internet
connected devices. You can hoover, boil a kettle, spy on your delivery guy and turn
up your thermostat so your cat thinks it’s been teleported to the Bahamas all from your
phone. Now, although these devices can be pricey the main benefit for most of the manufacturer's
is the data they’re able to collect on you. Do you think Google would have spent $3.2
billion dollars on Nest if it couldn’t somehow get valuable information about you from it?
Do you think Amazon would sell a product that is in such high demand for £25 if you weren’t
telling it all of your worldly secrets?
There are other changes in the way we use the internet that have caused the surge in
data creation. Every single minute of every single day, more than 97,000 hours of Netflix
are streamed, over two million snapchat messages are sent and nearly half a million tweets
are sent. That’s a lot of Russian bots endorsing a certain Tangoed politician. This all amounts
to a prediction that in 2020, on average, every person will make 1.7mb of data every
second.
In 2009 we created just point 8 of a zettabyte of data, in 2013 it was up to 4 zettabytes
but it’s predicted that in 2025 we’ll be creating 163 zettabytes a year. If you
stored all of that onto standard CDs and stacked them you would reach the Mars and back. TWICE.
And still have a few CDs left over to uh, I guess use as coasters, or tree decorations,
or spaghetti measurers. I mean who even uses CDs anymore. Oh, seems safe.
Thanks for watching my video all about data. I know we already create a lot of it but I’d
be grateful if you could create just a little bit more for me by commenting on this video.
Tell me what you liked or hated, what you think about our impending data drowning future,
or suggest a topic for a future video. Be sure to subscribe to the channel for more
videos!