What’s the Matter with Data?
Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2025 4:38 am
Data are often described as the new oil.
Image: Offshore drilling rigs and a platform supply vessel lay idle on the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. (Michael Elleray, CC BY 2.0)
There may be some merit to this comparison. Both are ‘raw’ materials which are used to produce outcomes, be them plastics, fuel or targeted advertising, to name a few.
But this comparison fails because oil is finite, while data are not.
Firstly, where oil is consumed in the south africa rcs data production process, data can be endlessly reused (debatably only becoming out of date).
Secondly, because we are constantly originating new information all the time, and collecting more of it in turn, the only bounds to our access to data are our imaginations, and the laws which we put in place.
Data clearly are valuable, with the five biggest corporations in the world (by market capitalisation) all working in the areas of tech, data, and computer science. However, data are valuable in an unusual way. Firstly, if data are limitless, then we might suppose the value of data should be zero.
Another reason why data are not like oil is data are less fungible (substitutable) than oil, or another example, money.
Image: Offshore drilling rigs and a platform supply vessel lay idle on the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. (Michael Elleray, CC BY 2.0)
There may be some merit to this comparison. Both are ‘raw’ materials which are used to produce outcomes, be them plastics, fuel or targeted advertising, to name a few.
But this comparison fails because oil is finite, while data are not.
Firstly, where oil is consumed in the south africa rcs data production process, data can be endlessly reused (debatably only becoming out of date).
Secondly, because we are constantly originating new information all the time, and collecting more of it in turn, the only bounds to our access to data are our imaginations, and the laws which we put in place.
Data clearly are valuable, with the five biggest corporations in the world (by market capitalisation) all working in the areas of tech, data, and computer science. However, data are valuable in an unusual way. Firstly, if data are limitless, then we might suppose the value of data should be zero.
Another reason why data are not like oil is data are less fungible (substitutable) than oil, or another example, money.