Smart systems require openness.
Without entities collecting and sharing data across a persistent connection, there’s no intelligence to be had.
Want to know how many smokers there are in your city for public health research? You’ll have to ask them.
Want to know the religious breakdown of a community to better target your services? You’ll have to ask them, too.
But in a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, the always-connected “digital natives” born after 1980 will not only share information openly and freely online, but will continue to do so as they age.
Pew and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center in North Carolina asked 895 “technology experts” from academia, research, business and government whether they thought Millennials’ openness would diminish as they age.
More than two-thirds said they don’t believe it will happen. Those who disagreed said Gen Y will simply not have enough time to share everything as life’s responsibilities pile up.
An MSNBC article on the survey focuses on the generation’s concern (or lack thereof) for privacy, particularly with regard to posting photos, videos and other incremental updates about their lives.
But the article leaves out the possibilities for all that data. To use one example, Facebook is a place for complaints, party photos and online game-playing — but it’s also a rich resource for demographic information across geographies and usage data among a massive and growing population.
That’s a big dataset.
For now, the focus is on how advertisers can market and target with that information for more relevant offerings. But imagine, if only for a moment, how that data can be used to understand society — in real-time.
Some say Millennials will share less tame information as it gets older, and that may be true.
But with a culture of sharing ingrained in a generation, the necessary steps may already have been taken to ensure that the next generation of consumers will think nothing of breaking down proprietary corporate walls to broadcast home energy usage statistics, data detail of driving habits and — quite literally — where they are in the world.
