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Patrizia Tomasi-Bensik
BeInG DATA Instructor

“Be the change that you want to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi

BeInG DATA

We Westerners had our thinking organized by Aristotle. It was he who, in the fourth century BC, proposed a logical order of classification of the world, where conclusions depend – linearly – on certain principles. The Aristotelian syllogism that has governed our thinking so far is based on: major premise plus minor premise equals the conclusion.
Orientals –literally on the other hand- think of wholes within wholes. Simply put, while we Occidentals struggle riding the bicycle, people on the other side of the world drive Ferraris.

The big advantage is that –linearly- we are fantastic and it was through straight-line thinking that we opened up such doors as to Big Data. The big problem which now presents itself is our traditional mental laziness. As Richard Dawkins brilliantly expresses in his book “The Selfish Gene”, we are afflicted by atavistic, primordial laziness and, since we are still able to deal with reality within our usual perspective, we feel no need to change. That's a choice, however. We can surely treat Big Data as an ocean of data, totally suited to IT professionals, where through well-known algorithms we squeeze the juice out of an orange. However, the problem with this approach is that we throw away the peel and bagasse, wasting the essential oil and citric acid, which are worth much more than the juice itself! In this sense, it's about time to change perspective. This is the time to adapt our linear thinking to contexts and, from there on, perceive the incredible discoveries that arise from looking at totalities, within totalities, linked to other totalities. It's exactly the same process that takes place in chemistry. Elements, like data, are omnipresently available in this vast ocean, searching –with its connectors- for suitable receivers. Just to set the best possible example, let's take life. How did life start? Let's imagine an ancestral sea, full of nutrients, swimming to and fro, fully capable of potential existence, although rendered impossible due to the lack of particular environmental proprieties. And yet, because of a matter of conjunction between the polarity of water and primordial lipids, the first vesicle is formed. This “little bag”, this primal bubble is the environment that was lacking for the manifestation of life. From there on the ancient sea makes sense, as vesicles start to proliferate, organisms are created and become more and more sophisticated and life explodes into a gigantic, mind-boggling jigsaw puzzle, where every piece is exactly where it should be and we simply know that that's the right way for it to be.

Today we have this galactic sea of data; information that is completely suitable for transformation into knowledge. If we make an effort in the sense of understanding the dynamics of this universe of data, its interactions, strong and weak, polarities, adequate environments for contextualization, perhaps then we will arrive at -surprise of the surprises- the purest form of mechanics and who knows, even solving and going beyond "Descartes' Demon". The only certainty? That it's worthwhile making the journey and giving it a shot!