There’s a bit of a digital thing going on in my brain at the moment. The strange thing is that snippets of news keep feeding into this train of thought.
Like the 17 year old youth police commissioner who resigned over her twitter history. Like the child who ran up a bill of a few thousand pounds on his parents’ iPad, by playing an online game app. In a strange way which made me think of the person I interviewed a few years ago, who had googled me beforehand and told me my life history before we really started the meeting! Still not sure what he was trying to prove…
There is so much information about everyone of us out there now, its frightening. The tide has surrounded us on the beach. And the Pandora’s box is open, and there’s no going back. And yet the positives… all my data is backed up to the cloud, and i can access it anywhere on any device (isn’t Dropbox wonderful??!!). When I worked for myself as an architect 20 years ago, what i was doing then, seems almost archaic compared to what we can do now, without even thinking about it consciously.
I’ve also been reading about trends in Big Data, and BIM actually is just a part of the puzzle of how things might be. Billions of financial transactions and bits of data can be processed in seconds to tell the conglomerates what we’re going to buy, what’s going to be popular and how we want to spend our money, and what we want to do.
We have been living in a data goldfish bowl for several years now and rather like the proverbial frogs in the boiling water we’re acclimatising bit by bit. How will Big Data impact the construction industry? Perhaps real time performance stats on companies, supply chains, individuals even? Extend this to products, systems, suppliers? Libraries of data available at micro charges, so that we as data traders can access and sell data, as we trade on an open digital market across the globe. Why should Google and Facebook be able to make money from my data? and yet they don’t pay me anything…soon we’ll have mechanisms that mean we can make money from data, rather like Ebay but for data trading…sure, i’ll accept your cookies…but it’ll cost you!
I don’t know. Some commentators are already saying the next 10 years will see more technological change and innovation than we’ve already seen in the last century. Perhaps we’e moving to a digitally enabled society and we don’t know, can’t even imagine all the implications yet.
However it turns out, I suspect that running up a bill of few grand on an iPad will be small beer in comparison!
Cheers
J.
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