Every day, the news media confronts us with enormous budgets: $3,000,000,000,000 for the Iraq war, $2,800,000,000,000 for the financial recovery, $16,000,000,000 for Facebook. Except they’re usually reported with the ambiguous numerical categories of trillion and billion. When your daily budget is a dollar, $10 billion and $10 trillion both look astronomically large — but difficult to compare. While I think listing out zeroes is helpful, despite the added space required (Hey, everything is online now anyways!), visualizations can make that comparison even easier. David McCandless has put together a good visualization of various world budgets. Though I would disagree about some of the categorizations, since government stimulus money is not actually lost, the boxes themselves are relatively useful.
We are truly in the information age. Everywhere, data is being constantly collected, distributed, analyzed, and visualized. Increasingly, government data (which has long been collected, but cumbersome to access) is being opened up. Additional social data augments this twelve-fold. In short, the depth and breadth of data sets are rapidly being expanded. Some applications of this data are very useful, such as Google tracking flu activity through search queries.1 Other implementations are far more fanciful, like the hypnotizing Now dashboard from Sprint. The page is filled with data about now, with a background track of various statistics and slogans playing. Despite its limited practical use, the page serves as an apt example of both the data available and the ensuing information overload. As the voice instructively shares, “please keep your hands inside the moment at all times.”2
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