Are People Becoming Lazier?
More and more brick-and-mortar stores are closing in recent years because of a severe decrease in the number of customers going to the stores. Where did all these customers go? Well, most customers moved from going to local department stores to online shopping — an easier way to buy more diverse commodities. Moreover, online shopping provides a page of content that most likely matches your taste.
Ecommerce is an excellent example of a data application. Although shopping is already addicting for a small population, online shopping can expand this population to an astonishing number. According to Statista, in 2020, a total of over 80 percent of consumers across the globe shopped online. Even though the number is affected by the pandemic, it still proves that online shopping is one of the safest ways to buy things while including a variety of the same type of item.
The statistics show that the pandemic is not the only reason the online shopping population has increased. In my opinion, I don’t particularly appreciate going out to shop because it is exhausting and time-consuming. By moving from a store to the next takes not only time but also energy. Online shopping can save me energy while spending less time looking for things I want. For example, if buyers want to buy a hoodie while shopping, they will need to look around if a store has a hoodie they like, and buyers often have to ask for the price and if there’s a fitting size for them. However, in online shopping, buyers can search for the type, the brand, the design, or the color they want for the hoodie. In China, shoppers mainly use Taobao for online shopping, and the search results satisfy them most of the time. Why is online shopping so convenient? It’s the product of data application. Sometimes buyers don’t even need to search for something they want, and it would just pop up on the app's front page. These online shopping platforms collect your preferences through past viewed commodities, transforming similar items into recommended items. Ecommerce is only one of the common uses of data applications.
Another application that is most common nowadays is Tik-Tok. Tik-Tok uses big data to enhance the user experience of watching short videos. Whenever users search up something on Tik-Tok, their “recommended” would soon be related to the topic that they just searched up. Moreover, whenever users like a video, their other “recommended” videos would be related to that topic. This technique is not only used by Tik-Tok, but also by other video platforms such as YouTube. People often get “addicted” to watching videos due to big data. Who wouldn’t want to keep watching the videos they like? The video platform is the sneaky part of big data: it keeps users addicted (See figure 3).
In the age of big data, you can’t hide your hobbies anymore; you can’t resist clicking something you like. Companies might sound very serious about keeping your privacy safe, so sometimes, they would ask if you would like to share the data with the company. Arguably, there’s no difference in clicking “yes” and “no” since you will be “sharing” the data when you use it. Is it the company that’s violating privacy rules? No, because you are willing to share your data preference with them, and they must store it in their database to ensure that they won’t lose users’ data. Big data is not technically a bad thing, though. It makes our lives easier by recommending the subjects we like and eliminating those we don’t. Just like how the famous businessman Andrew Grove has said, “Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this electronic age.”
