DATABASE: Researchers collect data through a cloud computing-based health monitoring system developed by the Shandong Computing Science Center in Jinan, Shandong Province, on February 24 (ZHU ZHENG)

In order to find the most accepted answer, the production team surveys users of Tencent services. If more than half netizens surveyed reply positively, then the behavior or thought is considered "normal."

The survey covers people in different areas and across different age groups. Some questions were answered by more than 9 million respondents.

Nowadays, it is difficult to tell whether something is a norm or not as people become more independent and individualistic and often run counter to traditional lifestyles or values, said netizen Li Shouzhi.

Some data quoted by the program's host Hua Shao could be cause for concern. For instance, 92 percent of survey respondents said that they could not keep secrets, and 92 percent said that they once read messages on their lovers' cellphones without permission.

Data collected by the program's production team act as a weathervane that can tell us about people's beliefs, habits or aesthetic standards, according to an anonymous social scholar who was quoted by Shanghai-based Dongfang Daily.

Improving livelihood

Cheng Zhi, a government worker in Beijing, is a loyal fan of Are You Normal?. As a Ph.D. candidate specializing in sociology, she cares about the numbers behind the show.

"I think many people are just like me, trying to judge whether a behavior is normal or not through big data. They want to understand society better and find solutions to its problems," Cheng said.

One episode shocked Cheng, however, when it was revealed that 55 percent of netizens said that they once considered committing suicide. "Yet this is very normal, given the pressure that Chinese people are currently subjected to," Cheng said.

Cheng believes that a large population, social transformation and ballooning material needs create pressure, and finding methods to cope with this pressure is becoming a critical issue in China. "The most fundamental function of the big-data technology is to forecast what will happen in the future based on certain patterns," she noted.

Cheng likened a city to an enormous data base. It is the source of big data, and it is also changed by big data. "We are still on the eve of the big-data era, yet we already can barely live without," she said.

According to Cheng, she first became aware of the big-data technology after an online purchase of a book on pregnancy. "I bought the book for my sister, who wanted to have a baby. In the following 10 months, advertisements on products for expectant mothers and babies kept on popping up in my Internet browser," she said. "The advertisements I received were customized to my online purchasing and inquiry records."

"Recently, the big-data technology has been widely used in Internet finance and education sectors to tailor their services to specific client needs," said Shuai Peng, Deputy Director of Internet search company Baidu's Research and Development Center.

Shuai said that the big-data technology has made what was impossible in the past possible, and that it would certainly change people's lives more profoundly in the near future.

In the public service sector, the big-data technology has great potential to tap, said Xu Jihua, Feng Qina and Chen Ruzhen in a book on public administration in the big-data era that they co-authored.

The government controls big data in various fields such as population, traffic, healthcare, social insurance, taxation and urban planning, Chen said. Nonetheless, data kept by various government departments have not been effectively synthesized to serve the people, he commented.

For instance, to purchase a property, one has to fill in dozens of forms, while more than one third of information in the forms are already stored in government database, which could be retrieved automatically by keying in one's identification number.

Now, the big-data technology has given Beijing residents access to new public services when logging onto Mybj.gov.cn, a portal run by the Beijing Municipal Government, such as paying public utility bills and making appointments with doctors.

"This is just the beginning," Xu said, who believes that the government will provide more customized services through the Internet in the future.

Email us at: tangyuankai@bjreview.com