Big Data are structured, semi-structured, unstructured, and raw data that are revolutionizing how we think about and use information in the 21st century. Big Data represents a paradigm shift from our prior use of traditional data assets over the past 30+ years, such as numeric and textual data, to generating and accessing petabytes and beyond of images and social media. Traditional databases stored only structured data consisting of letters and numbers, but in the era of Big Data a need arose to incorporate unstructured data as part of overall information management. The shift to Big Data started with the Internet boom of the mid to late 1990s and the "rich data" that could be collected through semi-structured and unstructured petabytes of behavioral, image, textual, and social media data. Social media, such a Facebook, Twitter, Wikis, Blogs, YouTube, etc., has also changed our view of data. Big Data is a relatively nascent field of study that has spawned the development of new hardware, software, and database architectures to handle the large volume of structured and unstructured data. However, the foundation for the exploration and analysis of Big Data is as old as the Information Age itself and is rooted in the field of communications. In this paper, the authors show how communication theory has developed in parallel with the development of the Information Age and how the application of convergent theories resulted in Big Data producing Business Intelligence.