 The term datification refers to the fact that we're looking at more and more things and using technology to render them into a data format. Simply said, it's about taking previously invisible processes or activities and turning them into data that can be monitored, tracked, analyzed and optimized through analytics. Whereas digitalization has been a process taking place over many decades now, datification is a relatively new phenomenon. The difference being that whereas digitalization was about converting information into a digital format, datification is more about the interaction between the digital domain and physical objects, processes and environments. With mobile computing and the internet of things, we now have all kinds of sensors in our environments and we're starting to convert all sorts of things into a data format. There are many examples of this from putting sensors on a bridge for monitoring its structural integrity to monitoring parking spaces, performing a 3D scan of an object to measuring the activity levels of a person's health. One specific example is the company General Electric that is in the process of converting themselves from an industrial company to what they call a digital industrial company where they create a digital twin for every one of their products. Their physical technologies are now surrounded by sensors and controllers that can pull a massive amount of data from a jet engine, from an MRI scanner, from a jet turbine, wind turbine which will provide real-time data about themselves that goes into a virtual model of the system that is unique to that machine. This digital twin is a cloud-based virtual image of the physical asset, maintained throughout its life cycle and easily accessible. Within seconds of a new wind turbine going into operations, tens of thousands of data points are created and entered into the model. Likewise, more and more of our social activities are being rendered into a digital format. Facebook datafies our friendships, LinkedIn datafies our professional accomplishments, Twitter datafies our thoughts, and Google Maps datafies our location. A multitude of different technologies are now available that help individuals monitor and measure things that were previously difficult or impossible to quantify. Everything from how much energy and water one uses, what your food purchasing habits are, the air quality of your neighborhood, when you were awake or asleep, knowing when you're stressed or what road you selected to drive to work, how you brushed your teeth in the morning etc. We create data every time we talk on the phone, send a text message, watch a video, withdraw money from an ATM, use a credit card or even just walk past a security camera. All this can now be measured, quantified and compared. The word data comes from the Latin term meaning literally something given. It is a set of quantities, characters or symbols, an assumption or premise from which inferences may be drawn. It is the basis of reasoning or calculation. Data represents discrete units of information and thus we're always isolating some aspect of the phenomenon and freezing it. Data is always a slice of reality, we're chopping the world up into little bits and taking that information as in some way complete. This makes data portable, it can be taken from one context and brought into another, making it amenable to cross-correlation. All data in the real world exists within an integrated context. No matter how extensive our gathering of data, we will only ever be able to capture a partial representation of the system and in so doing separate it from its overall context. Data is always incomplete but that discrete nature of data makes it quantifiable and thus amenable to formal quantitative methods of analysis. As such data as a general concept refers to the fact that some existing information or knowledge is represented or encoded in some form suitable for processing within a computer, whereas data and information have always existed around us. What datification does is make that information available for computerized analysis. The primary use of data is for manipulation within computer programs, which are formal systems, thus with datification we're taking the informal everyday worlds and converting it into a virtual structured format that can be used within a formal system. As previously with digitalization, we converted many forms of information that were already in a structured and quantifiable format into a digital form for them to be accessible to individual computer programs. What we're doing today though is building platforms that operate as computers but now on the macro level. A computer is a system that manipulates data according to a set of instructions, whereas previously this data and instructions were in individual computers. Now with cloud computing, online platforms are the computers. With their algorithms running in data centers, they take in data about people and things and analyze it to create an output. A platform society is where our technology and social lives are increasingly channeled through online platforms. Our informal lives and our engineered systems become moved to formal platforms, whether this is dating websites, car sharing platforms or health websites. They all require that we datify the things in our worlds and our lives and input that data to the platform which then acts on it, analyzing it to create insight, make decisions, match and coordinate different systems. As a consequence of moving ever more of our systems of organization to these automated platforms, we begin to increase in the understand and manage organizations and things via sets of data points. As an ever more complete information picture of who we are in our engineered environment is compiled in these cloud based information systems that we call platforms. This is the current journey that we're on, we're going to turn our world into data so that we can bring it into these platforms, these formal systems and process it. However, a lot of the problems we're going to have are going to really come from this incompleteness of data. Data will unavoidably emit many features of the world, distort others and decontextualize events. This process of datification enables us to change the very foundations upon which we make decisions for organizing society and economy. Instead of people making best effort guesses in a context of incomplete information, it takes us into a world of decisions being made by algorithms based upon huge amounts of data that coordinate the platforms that increasingly mediate every aspect of our lives. This has profound long term consequences, it begins to change some of the fundamental mechanisms upon which societies have always depended. From the basis of the techniques used in the scientific method to how economies are measured and structured, to how businesses are run, to how we understand our bodies and the world around us.