Podcast – Why the Internet Knows Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

In this digitally connected era, all of us produce enormous numbers of data points every day. What we search. How we search it. What we buy, and what we read. What we like and dislike, whom we chose to associate with, and so much more — a steady stream of data that can be quantified, sifted and analyzed en masse with the data from everyone else to reveal patterns previously hidden, sometimes things we’re not even aware of about ourselves.

That data may offer us as a society a better way to truly understand who people really are, a theory that author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz submits for our consideration in his new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. A former Google data scientist who is also a visiting lecturer at Wharton, Stephens-Davidowitz joined the Knowledge@Wharton Show on Sirius XM channel 111 to talk about what properly analyzed big data can reveal about our political views, our health, our biases and more.

Podcast and Full Text: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/internet-can-tell-us-really/