Published: 16 March 2025
Every day nearly 2.5 terabytes of data are coming onto the internet worldwide. This calculation is from four years ago. It is assumed that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be released daily. If you are unfamiliar with the word exabyte, then know that the amount of data that fits in one exabyte would require more than 2 crore DVDs to contain. We are constantly creating data online whilst eating, whilst walking, whilst reading news, whilst talking, whilst sending messages, whilst viewing pictures, even whilst sleeping. Whatever you are ordering online, every GPS point of your movement, the record of sleeping or walking that you see in your smartphone's health app, every like or post on Facebook or Twitter, all of this is data. Every moment of ours connected to the internet is continuously creating digital data. We are living in a world of data. Data is influencing our individual habits, economy, social life, everything.
What data is will be discussed more later. But now, broadly speaking, what is data actually not? Everything can be seen, understood and explained with data. This was about digital data found on the internet. Think once, how many files are being created in every office daily, how much information is there in them? The more technology is advancing, the more our files are becoming digital. As a journalist, earlier how much trouble one had to take to bring a paper copy from a source. Now just taking a picture of the paper in the file is enough. In many cases, one does not even have to go; sources are sending documents to your email, WhatsApp or Messenger. Now finding such a journalist is difficult whose mobile does not have any image or PDF of documents or government statistics. When you are converting those very documents into text with an OCR or Optical Character Recognition app, or when you yourself are typing the information from that document into some file on the computer, it is then turning into digital data.
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