Data: you give it, you want it, you love it, you hate it. Consumers exchange it for convenience, corporations collect it for decision-making, and governments struggle to keep up with the frenetic churn. As an organisation, how does one make sense of the chaos? 

It seems like data makes today’s world go round. Politicians rely on it for consensus, organisations for sales, and individuals for self-knowledge. There’s so much data going around that it’s become invisible, ubiquitous and all-encompassing in our lives. Your Apple Watch that tracks your steps? That’s data collected. 

Five minutes of scrolling through TikTok includes a massive amount of data collection. Besides the apparent data on video watching, other data being collected consists of the user’s phone model and its operating system, the keystroke rhythms people exhibit when they type, and even reading the copy-and-paste clipboards of users. 

But it isn’t just TikTok; much of the app’s data collection is comparable to other data-hungry social networks such as Facebook. Similar data is also being collected for dozens of other apps, including Reddit, LinkedIn, the New York Times and the BBC News app.

Research suggests that the volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide is close to 100 Zettabytes. According to Seagate, 1 Zettabyte = 30 billion 4K movies, 60 billion video games, or 7.5 trillion MP3 songs. 

Also Read: Insurance 4.0: Harness your data reservoir for genuine impact

These 100 Zettabytes contain multitudes of information. To make that helpful information, one must first learn how to interpret and package the data into palatable, digestible content, crafting a story from Zettabytes.

Start small and use a scale to build familiarity

Author Chuck Palahniuk teaches how a writer can convince a reader of something beyond their own experience: you start with what the reader does know, and you move in baby steps toward what they don’t. 

Most people wouldn’t fathom how much of a Zettabyte is, so we break it down into things we’re familiar with: 30 billion 4K movies, 60 billion video games, etc. But it can still be difficult to comprehend 30 billion 4K movies, so we use another familiar precedent: Netflix’s entire catalogue has around 1,000 4K movies. Data storytelling is about packing and repackaging the same information until it makes the most sense. 

By doing this, we take something we all know and love and use it as a bridge to understanding something we might not be familiar with. You see this everywhere in data storytelling.

Apply scale with the use of metaphors, images and text

Visualisation is a common strategy in data storytelling, but it bears repeating. When you have data that is unfathomable, try instead to use visualising.

Brain studies have revealed that mental imagery impacts many cognitive processes in the brain: motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory. Data visualisation is key because the human brain is not well equipped to take in so much raw, unorganised information and extract usable learnings from it. 

For instance, a viral TikTok visualised Jeff Bezos’s wealth in rice grains. By using rice grains, an item that most people are familiar with, the audience is presented with comprehensible imagery. The TikToker used one grain of rice to represent US$100,000.

Most people know that Bezos is one of the richest humans alive, and yet, seeing the massive mound of rice grains that represents his wealth is still shocking. This data visualisation was so effective that the video went viral, with Insider, New York Post, Buzzfeed and Forbes covering it. 

So, with our Zettabyte, how do we visualise it? We’ve already added the familiar precedent of scale, where one Zettabyte is 30 billion 4k movies. While we all know what a 4K movie is, the notion is still intangible. So we bring in a familiar object that many of us use daily: an iPhone. 

Also Read: How these innovators are using data to change the world

Using simple calculations, we would need about 195 billion iPhone 13s with 512GB of storage to get to 100 Zettabytes of data. We can introduce physical spaces to add a spatial metaphor to make the data visualisation even more dimensional. 

Now we’re closer to fathoming how much tangible space is needed for 100 Zettabytes. 

Data-driven business decision making

Ultimately, data storytelling is for better decision making. Whether it’s to internal stakeholders, clients or telling the story of your business to people, one can use a wide range of tools and approaches to find, manipulate and visualise data.

Knowing how to build a data plan for your organisation, which includes forming hypotheses and using data to judge their validity, is a key foundation to successful data-driven decision making. 

At Hyper Island, we cultivate a Data Mindset– a mindset that builds data confidence by learning how to develop a clear story from a dataset such as analytics data using visualisation, developing a high-level dashboard for their organisation and describing how it supports the business and evaluating various data tools and their narrative qualities. 

While the potential of data is immense, one must also understand the social, ethical and legal issues that must be considered. Around the world, from the US Department of Justice to the EU, Big Tech companies are facing lawsuits and antitrust enforcement over data privacy.

Regulation has been lax in the last decade, but the tide is turning, and one needs to know that data collection is a double-edged sword and learn how to wield it. 

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