The title. I never understood that expression… can someone help?
Edit: auto correct on ‘someone’
In: 1694
“Meta” comes from the Greek, and can be translated variously as “after” or “beyond”. “Metamorphic” rock, for example, is rock “after” its shape (‘morph’) has changed. “Metaphysics” deals with the world after the physics are dealt with – i.e. the spiritual world. But I suspect you are talking about a newer meaning for the word, where it describes the use of data abstracted from the actual thing.
I worked in telecom for a while, doing traffic engineering. For any digital phone call, there is the ‘data’ – the actual 1’s and 0’s that form the conversation – and the ‘metadata’ – the time and date of the call, the duration, the calling number, the called number, etc. The metadata doesn’t tell you a thing about the call; it could be someone announcing a death in the family, or that you won Powerball. As a traffic engineer, the metadata was all I needed. I didn’t care what people were talking about; I just wanted to make sure there were enough resources for them to talk.
In the book *Spycatcher*, a retired British spy explains how he used metadata to identify the chief Soviet spook, or *rezident*, in London during the 50’s Cold War. At the time, the rezident would rotate on a regular basis, usually after identification as such. So the Soviets would take pains to disguise which of the many Embassy employees was the new spook.
To that end, when the rezident left the Embassy in his chauffered car, four or five other cars would also leave the Embassy at the same time, to confuse the MI5 spies trying to keep tabs on them. But car telephones were very expensive and rare at the time. Only the rezident would make a lot of calls; the decoy cars would not. The Brits realized that if they used radio to find the metadata of the calls, they could – and did – identify the rezident quickly. They didn’t have to understand the contents of a single call.
Similarly, an analysis of the meta-data of someone’s email would quickly reveal who a person’s closest associates are, just by seeing how often they correspond, how quickly they respond, etc., without ever seeing the contents of a single email. So something is ‘meta’ when it tells you something *about* something but doesn’t actually tell you anything about that thing specifically.
Others have given more examples in other replies, so I’ll leave it here.
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