It has been estimated that as many as 91% of the so-called facts from Donald Trump’s election campaign are untrue. The scale of this phenomenon means that the denial of false information has ceased to be effective because such messages are drowning in a sea of memes, tweets, catchy titles, and brainless posts. It's no wonder that Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth the word of the year for 2016.
In a broader sense — not just in political terms — this could be due to the phenomenon of data pollution. Virtual reality is suffocating from too much information. Experts from Qlik say that this phenomenon is so severe that it will come to define technological trends in the coming years, just as with business. Certainly, this is the case in the field of Business Intelligence.
2017 will be the beginning of the fight against data illiteracy, which is the process of spreading the skill of reading data and understanding its analysis, verification, and selection. Other trends for 2017 are big insights, Business Intelligence based on context, and the increasing use of data analysis tools by employees at all levels.
It is estimated that by 2018, 80% of data stored will be completely useless, with neither the possibility nor sense of processing it. This is directly related to the above-mentioned phenomenon of data pollution. Infrastructure for data storage is cheap and widely available, so companies are producing an increasing number of bytes. Unfortunately, their value is questionable at best. The collection of such data is often art for art's sake, without purpose and strategy, just a vague idea that it may prove useful sometime down the track.
The result is that even information that's important to a company often dies in the black hole of the database. Such a situation fails to facilitate the wider use of IoT. Like every great idea that originally was intended to serve the good of humanity (economical and ecological houses or cities, the comfort and convenience of senior citizens and people with disabilities, etc.), the Internet of Things is becoming a caricature of itself. The Internet can be connected to absolutely everything from the kettle to the cat’s litterbox, collecting terabytes of completely useless data. Wired Magazine mentions that the ironic term the Internet of Sh*ts is ever more popular — which basically means the imminent death of ideas, at least in their present-day, gadget-like form.
Everything points to the fact that the coming years will mark the end of the Big Data fetish and the beginning of big insights, which is a critical approach to the data being processed. There will be more and more of this data, and it will be more nuanced. Expanded reality and IoT will bring about the contextualization of data in the real world, which will enable the capture of specific events (our actions, decisions, and behavior) in a particular place and Time. This will further blur the boundary between the physical and virtual worlds. The game Pokemon Go is just one such example.
