How Has The Internet Impacted Your Life – The Timeline and Statistics

We spend hours of our day online and that’s so true. More than ‘a couple of minutes’, more than ‘some seconds for a little peek at updates’, more than ‘hold up while I respond to this email notification’, and definitely more than ‘I wish to quickly send a birthday message to an old classmate on Facebook’. Accumulate all of those “few seconds” and “a couple of minutes” online activities and you’ll find that you have spent a staggering couple of hours faffing, business-connecting, or social networking over the web.

Read: What do you do with your internet time and space

If you were to be probed on the exact amount of satisfaction you genuinely derive from any form of interaction that’s made possible by the internet, how would your answer turn out like on a satisfactory scale? A strong assumption would be that, for a scale of 1 – 10 [1 being ‘satisfaction is a myth’ and 10 being ‘satisfaction is an understatement. I’m super comfortable moving online to reside’], it is most likely that more responses would tend towards 10. I mean, who would claim to be unsatisfied and yet visit the internet regularly?

The Internet in our Lives

How is it that we have come to accept being on the internet as a major part of our life’s bustle? We keep molding exercises to demonstrate that we are in attendance online, or indicate internet availability, and then we find ways to sustain our presence online. If the internet has a defined entrance and a corresponding exit, the exit could as well be non-existent, since we all don’t exactly know what that means.

We never “exit” in the real sense, or do we? We get online and then stay there. When bored we move over to a next activity but our ‘tabs’ are still left open. The same happens when you make an inquiry online or search for certain information.

The Internet in our Businesses

We have even gotten to mount the base of our businesses on the Internet. If you understand what is known by brick & mortar, where it depicts a brand having physical domain structures, it has been reconstructed to brick & click, to depict having also an online structure. Presently, every business is encouraged to conform to this, for obvious reasons.

Obvious reasons being the need for growth and exposure, for some people so accustomed to the internet and don’t recognize a mapped difference between a business having a presence online as well as offline. In the sense that it is not a regular ‘state of affairs’ to incorporate an online structure to an offline business. Strategically planned processes and thoughts are now involved in getting situated online, just as what it is required for landing a physical address.

It is not a common endeavor as the iGeneration populates may see it to be. (Born between 1995 – 2012). As we have the internet crawling into our lives, our businesses are not left behind, for prosperity sakes.

The Internet in our Institutions

The internet culture has also found ways to creep into schools, churches, and various other institutions. Professors and lecturers request for assignments to be emailed, which has cut some burden of paper handling and record-keeping down to a minimum. For students, study materials are all over the web at a click away, and being updated regularly across the universe. Traveling to other States or friends’ cribs for information on certain researches or topics for school work is no longer necessary.

Churches are pushing their ministries to contain the online world by using media broadcasts and online follower-ship classes. They have social network pages and profiles to publicize missions and activities the church undertakes outside fellowship hours. They have an online presence too to converse and connect with more people.

Job search strategies are instigated online too. You may never need to make an appearance in person before you get employed. Computer tests and assessments could be undertaken and video calls could be initiated.

Severally, couples meet over the internet and a lot of marriages have been recorded to have been conducted online also. A friend gets ordained online to perform a wedding and the next day you tie the knot with your betrothed and live happily for years.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE INTERNET?

If told that there are countries at this moment that have little or no access to the Internet, would you believe? As said here on Quora, there are about “13 countries who limit or do not allow citizens to use the internet to find information”. If you were in one of those countries, what other ways would you connect with people? How differently would you spend your hours in a day?

Read: I landed the perfect job after this computer assessment

Has the evolution of the internet interfered with our mode or standard of living? With the inclusion of this web presence that was absent in the early stages of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, has it acted to our favour or against? Are we for the better than they were while at our ages? Will there be a significant knowledge gap or growth observed if teenagers of the pre-internet era were studied and put against teenagers of this present internet era?.

Here’s an interesting (or boring) timeline and statistics of the internet, also concerning social networking.

The Internet and Social Networks

The Millennials generation Brought About the Internet

It’s in the record that the internet (world wide web) began around 1990, and by 1991 it also became publicly available.

At the year 1997, there were already over 90million hosting. You could imagine that it’d grow beyond that number with time, and it did, piloting more engagements and activities on the internet. Ofcourse that translated to more and more users consequently.

1998 introduced the birth of Google, which grew to become the center of the web and the largest search engine by 2016 (to date). Facebook followed in line by 2004, Twitter in 2006. Then came Instagram and Pinterest by 2010, which sums up what is known to be the greatest media tools on the internet (essential for social networking), and also the world’s most popular fascinations, if you ask me.

With the growth of technology, making the internet reasonably compact, affordable, and accessible, more and more users are finding it stress-free engaging (online). They surf just as often and easily as they cook rice, take morning walks, or visit the barber’s shop.

That’s about when the internet began, and the pivot where it became a force to reckon with, along with the introduction of the big four social networking websites.

Now, About The Internet and Social Networking Numbers

Around 2015, it was estimated that about 3billion people use the internet worldwide, which is 47% of the world’s population. And this was from 738 million in 2000. But at the end of 2017, it escalated a bit to about 3.47billion users.

Now another statistics show that for every ten internet users globally, eight visit social networks/media. Perhaps, you may prefer as it was indicated in another research which summarizes as 71% of internet users are social network users.

Even going deeper, Matt Mansfield of SmallBizTrend says, “Around 1 in every 3 minutes spent online is devoted to social networking and messaging.

Maybe not food for thoughts but it has been estimated that in 2019 there will likely be 2.77billion “social network users around the globe” and “to reach some 3.02 billion monthly active social media users by 2021, around a third of Earth’s entire population” as explained in the futuristic capture in Statista. To help make these all simplified:

Year 2000, number of internet users worldwide equaled 738million. Number of social network users equaled zero.

Year 2017, number of internet users worldwide equaled 3.47billion. Number of social network users equaled 2.46billion.

Year 2021, number of internet users worldwide equaled 4.13billion. Number of social network users equaled 3.02billion.

The statistics also have you included.

How do these Internet & Social Networks’ Figures Affect Us

Social networking is now invariably a part of our daily culture. You could even say our new way of life. The growth in numbers regarding our usage online is almost geometric with the growth in population. At a space in time, more people are being aware of the objectives on the internet and taking advantage. Also, more people are having the means to easy internet access that wasn’t present before. So a new day brings news of people all around excelling and flourishing while engaging on social media.

In another frame, people indulge and get sucked into frivolous online activities. It’s easy to get carried away in the temporary frizzy, colorful, happy, harmonious world being depicted on the internet as we can selectively choose to be aware of. Meaning, 24hours can be spent on Snapchat if that’s our preference.

The social networks with the chatting, the conversations, the pictures of good events as on Instagram, the timely perfectly captured picture, can be a lot too much for us not to end up lazy, slow-minded, and lacking initiative. Bearing in mind that this state of mind will not make us the millionaires we do wish to be.

Read: Here’s how the internet features in a love story

According to this Telegraph article, “people are spending twice as much time online compared to 10 years ago, fuelled by the increasing use of tablets and smartphones. The biggest increase has been among young adults, with time spent online almost tripling from 10 hours and 24 minutes each week in 2005 to 27 hours and 36 minutes in 2014. Four in five social media users log into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or Tumblr – at least once a day.”

As said here, ‘the average person will spend nearly two hours (approximately 116 minutes) on social media everyday, which translates to a total of 5 years and 4 months spent over a lifetime. Even more, time spent on social is only expected to increase as platforms develop‘.

With all these numbers, if we don’t have a real impact on the internet or have the Internet impact our lives in some positive way, what difference do we have over the citizens that don’t have access to social networks? The figures culled from those articles written may not affect anyone personally, but it could keep us aware and mindful of not falling a victim to common statistics for no purpose.

If you could think of what you would say consumes a larger percentage of your internet data usage, what would it be? Does your time count for something?

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