2018-2019 exchange Winter 2019 Newsletter FINAL | Page 6

A Message from
The Chapter
President
Greetings ARMA Metro NYC Chapter Members and Friends,
One only needed a few minutes of Twitter time on January 28th be-
fore being inundated with tweets featuring the hashtag
#dataprivacyday, which is a nod to the internationally observed phe-
nomenon. Politicians, corporate executives, pundits of all walks of
life— even celebrities— all took to social media to express their views
on a once-esoteric issue that has galvanized the masses, seemingly
overnight, and has taken up center-stage in global policymaking de-
bates. It amazes me how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to
go.
To say that technology (and by that I mean the churning machine of
innovation and all its by-products: idea incubators, funding, research
and development, marketing) advances rapidly is a gross understate-
ment. We’ve come a long way from discovering that we can encode
binary information in a transistor. Indeed, our capacity to store data
has compounded steadily and predictably for a long time (see
Moore’s Law). As I see it, that evolution was the first dimension of da-
ta as a transformative process.
The second dimension was the advent of the Internet and its rapid
maturity into a full-blown ecosystem that enables us to distribute the
data, and to communicate in unprecedented ways. Along the way, we
managed to think up devices out of all that technological soup; devic-
es that can autonomously create their own data on top of the data
that we have generated.
Now there’s data being generated by more sources than ever, and at
a compounding rate. This is the third dimension.
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