The Internet is huge, global, and still growing
What was the world like before the Internet? That may seem a stupid question easily answered, but at times I find it hard to remember quite what we all did and how we all coped before the Web was born. Now, the Internet permeates every aspect of life, is a truly global phenomenon, is bigger than you can imagine, and is growing all the time both in terms of content and reach.
Just a decade ago, the amount of people online and using the Internet was a fraction of the figures we see today. It’s fair to say the Internet has changed the world, probably more than any invention since the PC. People use the Internet for a wide variety of things now, from working to entertainment, from banking to shopping, and lots more besides.
But how big is it?
That’s a question News.com.au decided to try and answer. There is no definitive answer because the calculations are immense. Different sources also claim different figures, particularly when it comes to what percentage of the populations of different countries are using the Web. But one thing they all agree on is that the Internet is absolutely monstrous in size.
Google and Microsoft Bing both claims to have have indexed over one trillion Web pages. Which means there are many times more Web addresses than there are people in the world. In fact, with the global population standing at around 6.7 billion, there are an estimated 150 Web pages for every man, woman, and child living on Earth.
If you wanted to read every scrap of information on the Internet at the moment, it would take you between 31,000 years and 600,000 decades depending on who you believe. Either way, I wouldn’t recommend you try to accomplish this impossible feat, especially as more Web pages are being added every single day.
It’s estimated that 1.46 billion people now use the Internet worldwide, which is a 16 percent increase from last year. It makes the 100 or so friends most of us have on Facebook seem a pitifully small number of contacts.
The country with the largest number of Web users is China, with between 298 million and 338 million Chinese residents venturing online regularly. The latter figure, which is the one claimed by the country itself, would mean China’s Web population is great than the entire population of the United States. Which is a scary statistic if ever I saw one.
However, China cannot compete with the U.S. in terms of the percentage of the population currently on the Internet. While an estimated 74.7 percent of the States is Web-enabled, that 298 million of Chinese people online represents only 22.4 percent of the population.
As huge as the Internet is right now, and it is unequivocally gigantic, it still has a lot of growth left in it yet. The amount of people getting online is sure to grow, especially in developing countries where the technology is only now starting to be integrated.
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July 31st, 2009
What was the world like before the Internet?
If you wanted information on something, you would go to the library. If you wanted to talk to people , you would use the phone.
If you wanted to buy something without leaving your house, you would have to get a catalog and then send the money in by snail mail and wait a month.
August 1st, 2009
I’d put the impact on par with Gutenberg. Turning the world into essentially a big network has given a power to individuals to record and disseminate information and start businesses with an ease impossible to predict just a couple of decades ago.
China is trying to censor and tame it, tough to do unless they want to kill expansion of domestic economy.
The inability of Iran to stop the flow of images and commentary despite expelling the foreign media after the last election is jaw dropping amazing for us geezers who remember the 60′s and 70′s.