The internet today is immensely different than what it was at the beginning.
At its creation and until the early 2000s, the internet was more like the concept of older broadcasting mass media: users were consumers. Web 1.0, as it is called, did not add any personalized experience to its users by allowing us to passively consume information without interaction.
The real revolution comes with the interactivity of the internet: as we search on Google, or spend time on Facebook, for example, the website collects data about us. This data collection is used to personalize our experience and provide us with better content so that we would spend more time on said website.
Eventually, these companies realized they could package all the data collected and sell it to advertisers.
Web 2.0 is the era of targeted ads.
The current structure of the internet for how we know it and utilize it today is often referred to as Web 2.0, in which as we utilize and interact with a website, this collects data and interprets our behavior to give us a largely personalized experience: when you and I open the same website, we will likely have a very different feed.
The digital revolution is moving at a pace unseen before. Technology advancements are allowing us to know what a place we have never been to looks like, from buildings to roads, to consume any media content we can think of, and even to communicate in a language we don’t know.
With the constant rise of digitalization in our modern world, we have access to more information today than ever in history, all at our fingertips.
To access this information, we use digital online services that often appear free of charge. The most obvious example that comes to mind, is Google and its set of applications such as Search, YouTube, Maps, and Gmail.
This new set of digital services has become so crucial for us that nowadays living without a smartphone sounds odd – if not impossible.
This knowledge overload has imprinted a whole new way of perceiving the world on the new generations.
When we think of the online services, we are now so accustomed to using, we think of them as free of charge, but we often overlook the fact that although we don’t pay with money, we pay with our data.
Data is irrelevant to companies and governments. When data is contextualized, it becomes priceless.
When data gets contextualized and then analyzed, it becomes statistics – which is fundamental to research and therefore to knowledge and understanding.
All the information we put online is stored and utilized for many reasons, and it is easy to think of marketing as the main drive for data storage and exchange, but it doesn’t limit to that; predictive algorithms are more and more often employed to track and predict our behaviors and future status; let’s only think at those modern healthcare insurances basing their quotes on our health data, shopping behavior and overall lifestyle, helping each and every one of us improving the quality of our lives and of the society overall.
We often overlook research and technology advancement as one of the greatest and most beneficial resources that data can offer. All the contextualized data about a given topic is stored and can be utilized for research purposes – analysis that ranges from consumer goods to specialized medical and pharmaceuticals, to Artificial Intelligence.
Qualitative data research is crucial to the development of Artificial Intelligence – to develop technology able to not only understand us but interpret us, technology needs to first analyze all the qualitative information and extract our behaviors and mannerisms.
Web 3.0 is heading towards a process of decentralization of data: information won’t be owned by giant corporations but, theoretically, will be owned by all of us.
This would work in a way in which people would be able to exchange content, information, and money with each other, without the need for a middleman, such as a bank or a tech giant. It would follow the model of decentralized finance, an exchange of capital in the form of cryptocurrency, which is not owned by banks.
With the help of AI, we could be looking at a world in which technology spaces into our environment, creating an interconnected synergy between objects, houses, and infrastructure: our surroundings will be able to communicate and predict our needs and, through smart household items, we will build smart cities.
Here at XYZ Field, we are interested in the users’ opinions and experiences regarding data exchange and the sharing of information – to us, qualitative research comes with a transparent usage of data for the sole purpose of research and research advancement.
We want to be part of the evolution of the internet and technological advancement, through qualitative and ethnographic research: our role and market research is crucial to understand what the needs of users are in terms of data exchange, concerns, and expectations. Our experience with projects on the evolution of the internet range from the topic of data privacy to cryptocurrency and the metaverse while placing the user at the core of the research, source, and ultimate beneficiary of this evolutive data journey.
