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92 Foreign Aff. 28 (2013)
The Rise of Big Data: How it's Changing the Way We Think about the World

handle is hein.journals/fora92 and id is 592 raw text is: The Rise of Big Data How It's Changing the Way We Think About the World Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger E veryone knows that the Internet has changed how businesses operate, governments function, and people live. But a new, less visible technological trend is just as transformative: big data. Big data starts with the fact that there is a lot more information floating around these days than ever before, and it is being put to extraordinary new uses. Big data is distinct from the Internet, although the Web makes it much easier to collect and share data. Big data is about more than just communication: the idea is that we can learn from a large body of information things that we could not comprehend when we used only smaller amounts. In the third century BC, the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough informa- tion in the world to give every person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria's entire collection-an estimated 1,200 exabytes' worth. If all this information were placed on CDs and they were stacked up, the CDs would form five separate piles that would all reach to the moon. This explosion of data is relatively new. As recently as the year 2000, only one-quarter of all the world's stored information was digital. The rest was preserved on paper, film, and other analog media. But because the amount of digital data expands so quickly-doubling around KENNETH CUKIER is Data Editor of The Economist. VIKTOR MAYER-SCHOENBERGER is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. They are the authors of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright @ by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 28 FOREIGN AFFAIRS