WOULD YOU DATE A “SELFIE?”

selfie satire

According to consultant and columnist Marcia Conner’s article entitled “Big on Data,”

“in 2012, every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (1 followed by 18 zeros) are created, with 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone. As a society, we’re producing and capturing more data each day than was seen by everyone since the beginning of the earth. This vast amount of digital data would fill DVD stack reaching from the Earth to moon and back.”

To put things in perspective, the entire works of William Shakespeare (in text form) represent about 5 MB of data. So, you could store about 1,000 copies of Shakespeare on a single DVD. The text in all the books in the Library of Congress would fit comfortably on a stack of DVDs the height of a single-story house.

The world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s according to Martin Hilbert and Priscila López. Given that unstructured data accounts for 80% of the data in the world, and we know much of that is from social media that gets special attention.”

I would attribute a great deal of this growth in data to the insidious “selfie.”  According to Tribune columnist Rex Huppke, selfies are likely a sign that human civilation has outlived its usefullness and will soon slide back into the ocean and be rightfully devoured by sharks.” Selfie, you ask, what’s that? The term, which almost mocks itself, A selfie is someone who documents his or her entire life by uploading self-taken pictures to validate what he or she is doing. Rest assured, if the world were taken over by aliens tomorrow, they would have an entirely documented world, whether they liked it or not.

For example:

  • People and brands on Twitter send more than 340 million tweets a day. (At least 1% of them are words of wisdom.)
  • People on Facebook share more than 684,000 bits of content a day. (Most are uploaded photos, many from selfies.)
  • People upload 72 hours (259,200 seconds) of new video to YouTube a minute. (Other than music videos, how many of these videos are worthy segments to the entirely worthless movie series Jackass)
  • Apple receives around 47,000 app downloads a minute. (Games and…)
  • Brands receive more than 34,000 Facebook ‘likes’a minute. (I like this)
  • Tumblr blog owners publish 27,000 new posts a minute. (No me…didn’t know about it)
  • Instagram photographers share 3,600 new photos a minute. (one click does all)
  • Flickr photographers upload 3,125 new photos a minute. (And Google grabs every one of them in images searches)
  • People perform over 2,000 Foursquare check-ins a minute. (Tell my why??)
  • Individuals and organizations launch 571 new websites a minute. (No wonder GoDaddy is super rich)
  • WordPress bloggers publish close to 350 new blog posts a minute. (Hey folks, I’m only doing one or two a week…)
  • The Mobile Web receives 217 new participants a minute. (Are you one of them?)

(Source:  https://marciaconner.com/blog/data-on-big-data/)

The title of my article is, “Would you date a Selfie? Sorry but this was actually a trick question. You see, if you’re reading this blog, probably on your I-Phone, you already are a selfie. And, by definition, selfies are so busy documenting everything that they do in life—keeping up with the cyber Jones—that they really don’t have time to date.  Or at least, date in the “traditional” sense.

No, they just “hang out.” Send me a PDA self-taken photo of you and your date actually dating and prove me wrong!

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *