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Hey Fonzies! Do you know that your every fingertip on smartphones is being monitored? Perhaps you noticed that some advertisements that you were recently interested in will pop out more often when you browse your Instagram. Maybe you were curious about why Netflix managed to recommend movies or shows that you were keen on watching every day. At the moment, you might wonder how the Internet gets to know us clearly in this virtual way. No worries. Nowadays, we are living in the world of big data! Without further ado, let me reveal what is big data to you, and let’s take a look at how big data influences our daily life!
1. Media and Entertainment
Massive numbers of users are accessing online entertainment these days such as YouTube, Netflix and Tik Tok. It helps to generate a great number of data which contributes to big data. As a result, media companies will deliberately rely on the big data collected to figure out consumers’ and users’ preferences. To illustrate, YouTube is using big data to recommend videos and channels to users. You will notice that YouTube seems to have some sort of magic power, especially when you find videos that you are interested in displayed in the recommendations section on the homepage and the Up Next panel without your prior subscriptions and searches. To explain this, YouTube is tracking every user’s watching habits such as time watched, likes, comments, and shares to predict users’ interest. YouTube will be suggesting content from other users who have similar watching habits to you. For example, if you are a big fan of K-pop, and frequently watch dance choreography videos on YouTube, they might be recommending Korean variety shows to you as well even though you did not watch any content regarding this. This is because other users who likes to watch K-pop dance videos just like you, are watching Korean variety shows too. Thus, other media platforms such as Spotify and Pandora will also suggest relevant playlists to us based on the previous music genre we listened to.
2. Advertising and Online Shopping
Online retailers and business analysers will be collecting consumers’ data from their shopping and searching activities to foresee consumers’ buying preferences. For instance, when you are looking for sport shoes on Shopee, you will find other sport attires popping up for you as well in the future when you log in to Shopee. In addition, sports-relevant content or advertisements will also be shown on your other social media or sites. Moreover, the application can suggest goods that you might want or would like to buy in the coming future using the data stored in machine learning algorithms. The algorithms will be tracking your browsing habits and give recommendations for goods to the targeted consumers. As an illustration, Amazon will generate a specialized profile for each consumer using predictive analytics to give shop and product recommendations. Therefore, our buying habits have definitely been influenced by big data as it keeps updating us on the products once we left a buying or searching history on the Internet. This will also indirectly encourage us to purchase more as the data analysis gets to know what goods consumers would like to buy by using the insights of big data!
3. News Feed and Information
When you land a spot on the Instagram Explore page, you will discover a lot of new content outside of the user accounts you followed. Instagram’s Explore algorithms will be tracing users’ reactions to a post such as likes, comments, and the number of visits to a page. The algorithms use the users’ view history or analysis of the user account they have interacted with previously to recommend relevant posts. Furthermore, the algorithms will also suggest some trending reels or most-talked posts that included popular hashtags as many users we followed had liked the content before. Hence, the algorithms will predict our interests and recommend related page accounts and contents. That is why you see common terms such as “Suggestions for you” and “People you might know” when you browse through your Facebook and Instagram. In short, big data help optimize personalized content for different users to create more engagement for users to stay on social media for a longer period of time. Thus, what we see and browse is actually controlled by big data!
4. Travel and Transportation
There is no doubt that big data helps improve the mobility of transportation as well. Data analyses will gather transportation data for every road from the navigation of GPS systems after being filtered through machine learning-based algorithms. Data scientists can then calculate the average driving speed and assess the alternative routes to drivers throughout the trip and journey. This is how Waze and Google Maps work to provide real-time optimal routes and traffic conditions to help you avoid traffic congestion and save time. The same thing goes to Grab. Grab is capable of using big data to predict travel times and road incidents. This makes it much easier for Grab drivers to plan their rides when fetching customers.
5. Healthcare
You might notice that most health records nowadays have been digitalized. When visiting the clinic and medical centre, the medical staff will require your information to be keyed into their systems as a record. In fact, you are contributing to the big data in healthcare. All the data recorded in the systems help the government or the medical department to trace the public’s health history for survey and clinical research purposes. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, big data plays a significant role in tracking disease transmission and keeping away the public from detected positive Covid-19 clusters. It enables data analyses to sort out the statistics and calculate the infectious risks in a short period. Moreover, big data has been used in the invention of wearable devices such as Fitbit and applications such as Google Fit and Huawei Health. Data generated from these services can help medical professionals monitor patients’ health conditions in real time. It is also helpful for a country’s medical progress by collecting all the data from the public to effectively raise health awareness.
To summarize, big data is everywhere and close to each of us. There is no doubt that big data has potential highlights in daily applications as it is a demand in almost every sector, especially in this fast-paced modern life. It gives a tremendous impact on technological advancement, pushing humans to a more advanced era. Hope my sharing has resolved your curiosity about big data. Before we end the conversation, let me leave you with a question. Do you agree that big data insights are shaping the world we live in?
Written by,
Zi Wei
The Fonz
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