According to a contemporary accounting information systems textbook, straightforwardly titled Accounting Information Systems, a glaring statistic haunts us: "With an incredible 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years alone."*
While this is seemingly impressive on the surface, and indeed it is (in a technical sense), this only accounts for data.
Once you learn what data is, then the statistic becomes instantly less impressive.
So, what is data?
For clarification, data is not defined by industry references including the Gartner Glossary of Information Technology even when it has dozens of entries with the word "data" in the title. Very curious tell, no?
The textbook, far more dutiful in its presentation, goes on to define data as "raw facts that describe the characteristics of an event that, in isolation, have little meaning."
This is to be contrasted with information. Information, going a step further, "is defined as data organized in a way meaningful to the user. Thus, data are often processed (aggregated, calculated, sorted, manipulated, etc.) and then combined with the appropriate context (year or location, etc.) to turn it into information." (p. 7). Moreover, "data are considered to be the input, whereas information is considered to be the output." End quote.
All of these considerations raw data vs. contextualized data (known as "information") falls well short of actionable insights that would account for wisdom.
Hardly an anachronism, "wisdom" is even invoked by Big Tech CEOs, such as Google's Hal Varian, within this same chapter of this same book who confessed that 'while data are widely available, "what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them."'
What are we to make of a world where data is omnipresent but insight into its meaning and value is far more limited?
That is a good question and a subject of profitable reflection, but as for now, I will merely bring up a single point:
One could go even further and say that the premium on or price of wisdom grows as data increases. Why? Because there is more effort in sifting through a growing accumulation of more and more facts. The more to be considered, the more time is required to cover these facts, to clean and to recognize them, and only then to weigh and consider their usefulness.
As the data sprawls in other words, which we are unambiguously witnessing, the timeliness of our insights becomes harder to come by. The time required to digest is lengthened such that the relevance of its application becomes difficult to pin down as more and more has to be processed at any given point in time.
For readers of Dickens, it would go as no surprise that the Thomas Gradgrinds of the world would ultimately fail in their enterprise to be "practical men of science". Facts alone that are hoarded are of little consequence to even men who boast about their practicality which is to say "men of action". This is because facts are quite senseless in and of themselves and thus worthless in the face of life's routines, problems and opportunities. To hoard them is quite more useless than writing poetry. After all, the art of poetry at the bare minimum can win another's heart.
*B. Marr, “How Much Data Is Produced Every Day 2021?, ” https://www.the-next-tech.com/, Accessed November 2022.
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