Clive Humby, in 2006, coined the phrase, “data is the new oil”. The phrase suggests that data has the power to cause the emergence of new world superpowers. The role of oil in global industrialization is undisputed. Nations who have access to oil tend to be the richest and most influential so there is a battle over who controls the oil industry.

In 2005, among the five most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization were three organisations in the energy, oil and gas sector and they were General Electric (GE), ExxonMobil, and BP, while the only tech company on the list was Microsoft. By 2023, oil companies have reduced to one, Saudi Aramco, while tech companies have increased to four- Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Is it a surprise that data is now the new oil? The market capitalization of several tech companies exceeds the GDPs of many nations. For instance, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are each richer than at least 180 nations, with Apple being richer than Canada, Russia, South Korea and Brazil among others. How about the influence on the citizenry across nations in the world? Tech companies serve as platforms that may exert more influence on people than their national governments. This means that whoever has access to data calls a shot. When you have a large data set about a group of people and you can analyze it intelligently, you are able to make informed decisions that will put you ahead of others. You can predict things by learning patterns and trends.

However, I would rather say that ATTENTION is the new oil. What is data anyway? It is the information gathered about people’s behavior, allowing businesses to sell to them. In an interview a few years ago, Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix stated that their competition was not other streaming services but anything at all that takes subscribers’ attention from Netflix.

Think about this: attention cannot be divided, it’s either we are attentive, or we are not. If tech companies are smart enough to stake so much money on our attention, how valuable is it to us. Perhaps our lives will be a lot better if we start to pay attention to what really matters to us.  Maybe we need to keep our attention from wandering and trailing every piece of news, post or video and concentrate on becoming better. Do you think this is possible? Share a comment on what we should pay attention to.