Friday, March 7, 2014

New Game: Curating BITS



Years after the industrial revolution men like Henry Ford made billions of dollars by assembling and curating raw materials such as iron and rubber.  The result of his assembling and curating raw materials was automobiles which could be sold at a nice profit.

Today,  the newest game is the assembling and the curating of bits.  Bits are binary digits. According to Wikipedia "A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. A bit can have only one of two values, and may therefore be physically implemented with a two-state device. The most common representation of these values are 0and1. The term bit is a portmanteau of binary digit."  Every piece of computer data is composed of bits.  The Netflix video that you watched last night is composed of bits.  Your Facebook images are composed of bits.  This article is a compilation of bits.

Google is the biggest player in the assembling and the curating of bits.  They have masterfully assembled and curated bits that you can't live without and charge a referral fee to advertisers for sending you to see their bits.  Henry Ford could only wish he could make money like this. According to Mashable.com, top bits that were searched on in 2013 in the United States include:
    Boston Marathon
    Government Shutdown
    VMAs
    Tornado in Moore, Okla.
    Royal Baby
    Zimmerman Trial
    Typhoon Haiyan
    New Pope
    Syria Conflict
    Mayweather versus Canelo

Unlike Netflix or Facebook, the majority of accessed bits from Google are text which is easy to store and retrieve.  Video and images require much more computing resources to manage.

When historians in the next century study us they will surely reflect on this time period with marvel.  What do you think?  Is assembling and curating bits the new game?