A small group of academics, business executives and journalists gathered at the M.I.T. Media Lab last Thursday, and the purpose was to toss out ideas and discuss the concept of “Data-Driven Societies.” A daunting topic, ambitious and vague at once, it seems.
But someone who has was host of the meeting: Alex Pentland, a computational social scientist at the Media Lab. He put his intellectual stake in the ground last year in a presentation posted on Edge.org, “Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data.”
Mr. Pentland’s starting point is that the most important data that is becoming available on a vast new scale is information about people’s behavior. For example, he cites location data from cellphones and evermore consumption data as people increasingly use credit cards for even the smallest purchases. He distinguishes this behavioral data from less-telling data — about people’s beliefs like Facebook communications or Google searches.
Yet now, Mr. Pentland says, it becomes possible to track social phenomena down to the individual level and the social and economic connections among individuals. The ability to monitor these “micro-patterns,” Mr. Pentland said, means “we’re entering a new era of social physics.”
See the full story here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/the-promise-and-peril-of-the-data-driven-society/