How busy was your day?

I am currently chipping my way through the books for Week 2, and came across a link to this article by Josh James entitled “Data Never Sleeps“. About 4 years ago Mr James and his team decided to record exactly how much digital data was produced every minute, and among the things they discovered was that just on Facebook alone users were sharing 684,478 pieces of content per minutes – 2 years later that count was 2,460,000. Every. Minute.

When I was about 15, our school conducted a school-wide project to teach us just how big 1,000,000 was, and they made us count out 1,000,000 matches. I think each student was given maybe 5 minutes to count and tally as many matches as they could, and at the end of their time they put the matches into the pile and we watched it grow. 1,000,000 matches is a lot of matches, and to this very day every time I hear a number in the millions I think to myself (and sometimes out loud) “That’s a lot of matches…”

This article by Daniel Price about big data says that 90% of all data ever produced by humankind was made in the last two years. I have heard of megabytes, and gigabytes, and terabytes, but did you know there were now zetabytes too? A zetabyte, just so you know, is 10 million gigabytes.

Mr Jones and his team put together this infographic that shows you how much data is produced every minute – every tweet, every pin, every time you swipe on Tinder, every Google search…How much of this was created by you?