Computers were invented for crunching numbers as their primary task. All kinds of institutions - those having those numbers to crunch - funded that first wave of computing. The users were analysts, and scientists who actually wanted to make calculated decisions. Computers were helping to evaluate these decisions in a relatively unambiguous manner. The answers were always transparent to users as well as decision model. Then came the business-times. Spreadsheets, and to some extent word processors, were also decision-making tools. Large corporations formed around it, and new software flooded the market. Computers were helping again to make decisions in a transparent manner.. And now a third wave is rolling. Now search engines, and social networks help making decisions, but focus has shifted. The data upon which first mainframes based the answers used to be collected manually, and then manually fed into computers. The second generation had started sharing data in electronic form, yet their origins was were almost inevitably traced to some sort of manual entering. Now data are just there. Of course the major bulk of data - such as blogs - supplied by users. But nevertheless it can be threated, and processed automatically in such fashion the the authorship no longer holds, producing new original decision-helping data completely automatically.
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