A Mountain of Scata

When I hear the word "data" used for the mountain of daily dribble that Facebook and sites like it have piled up in their basements, I ever so slightly wince.

It must be the tiny weekend scientist inside me banging on my skull.

The word 'data' used to imply actual research.  You couldn't just record a phone call you had with a middle school friend talking about teachers and band class and call that "data".

Data starts with an intention, with some question in mind. It has a form of your own design so that you can fill it in like ice-tray popsicles, and then look it over to see what colors came out.

Modern 'data', especially 'big data', is characterized by a complete lack of form and mostly a complete lack of intention.  The questions come out of the data.

This is obviously not the same as real Data, and it's high time someone did something about it.

So I'm proposing a word that embodies both intention and circumstance, regularity and randomness. That word is -- wait for it -- 'scata'.  Don't like it?  Would you believe, 'guana'?

Think about it.  You don't want to confuse real useful stuff with the kind of 'information' you get out of millions of people commenting on cats and pummeling each other with babies and dogs.

You're really going to need a way to quickly inform the doctor or <gasp> data scientist next to you that yes, you get it, trying to squeeze a gem out of the vanilla pudding and Lucky Charms that is Facebook is as absurd as Jules Verne going on about submarines.

And data scientists will finally have a language ally, instead of that infidel that constantly betrays them as they try and explain that no, in fact it's not "data", it is largely a nonsensical string of gibberish that, if we spend enough money on processing power and storage, may one day derive the internal motivation of cats, but right now we have no results thank you -- while their smooth friend down the hall glides off to their genetic sequencing work using real Data.