The Digitization of Everything

According to economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, digitization can be defines as encoding information as a stream of bits. This information includes everything from photos, videos, sounds, texts and data. One of the biggest example of digitization in real life is the popular smartphone application called Waze. Waze uses many streams of information like the street map and the location coordinates of the starting and end point which both have been digitized in a stream of data containing of bits. Another example of digitization is the cloud service like Dropbox. We used to share a written content or file in a form of physical copy like a floppy disk but today we are more likely to sent the file through an email or sharing service provided by Dropbox. Is digitization of everything is an asset? Oh yeah. Definitely.

As we move deeper into the fourth industrial revolution, digitization continues to spread and accelerate with no sign of stopping. According to Cisco Systems, worldwide Internet traffic has increased by a factor of twelve in just five years period of time between 2005 and 2011. The total volume of memories used during that period is reaching 23.9 exabytes each month. If you are familiar with prefixes in the metric system, you know how big exabytes is in number. It is basically 10 to the power of eighteen in numbers. This indicates that digitization has promoted the explosion of data and will continue to do so at an exponential rate in the coming years. Some people said that data is the new oil. As of March 2012, Google had scanned about more than 20 million books published over the past centuries which can help us better understand our past histories. There is no surprise that every possible things in our life can be digitized. Imagine what if our knowledge is digitized into bits? We basically could figure out what we are lacking in knowledge and could fix that easily to become a smarter person than we are yesterday by having this powerful tool in digitzation.