To understand how new technologies are developed and used, we need to consider both their technical features and the ways that social actions shape them. Through communication, people assign different meanings to technologies. In these discussions, we are sharing our visions – both optimistic and pessimistic – about society. Communicating about technology in this way helps us think about new meanings, of new uses, and even of new kinds of technologies.
Communications researcher Robert McChesney has written many books on the development of different technologies – from radio and telephones to the Internet. As a critical scholar, he explores how politics and economics are embedded in the ways that these large-scale information and communication technologies are developed and used.
McChesney’s book Digital Disconnect explores the Internet revolution and its implications for society. He talks about how the Internet has increased the amount of information available in the world today. For example, in 2003 the sum total of all the information created since the dawn of time was around 5 billion gigabytes.
By 2020, people were creating an estimated 2.5 Quintillion bytes daily – 2.5 million terabytes (2.5 billion gigabytes) per day. *Note that this is exactly the same number quoted for 2012 – the statistic apparently coming from IBM and quoted in this BBC article from 2014. While the statistics are confusing, the same article notes that “Nobody really knows because the volume is growing so fast“. What is clear is that the amount of data is immense and rapidly increasing.
Between 2010 and 2012, the amount of content hosted on YouTube doubled in size. In less than a week, people now upload as much content to YouTube as was created in the entire history of Hollywood.
The Internet is big in other ways. Think about how much time we spend on it. In 2009, the average American spent around 11 and a half hours a day consuming ‘information’. This is up from 7 and a half hours a day in 1980.
The number of people consuming – and contributing – information has also increased. From around 10 million users in 1995, the Internet had around 2 billion users by 2011. In July 2020 the number was estimated to be 4.8 billion.
Previously, a video from 2012 called A Day in the Life of Social Media, had been embedded here, but that video, along with its outdated statistics, has disappeared. The extent of social media use back then seemed mind-boggling. It has not stopped increasing at a startling rate. Our rapidly increasing creation of data hasn’t slowed and doesn’t seem likely to do so any time soon.
Video: Social Media Trends 2021 (published Oct 19, 2020)
This is a trend roundup by Envato aimed at social media marketers. While there is a lot of interesting information for the rest of us, this video and many more like it, are focused more on the monetizing potential of social media than anything else – this video had 36,740 views by Mid-February 2021 – about 4 months – which according to online marketing strategists tubularlabs, indicates moderate success for a YouTube video. Notice the slick production value of this commercial offering, the dizzying speed at which it has been cut, creating an unbroken barrage of stimulation. This video addresses the reduction of viewers’ attention spans while it simultaneously demonstrates how to retain them. This video is an advertisement for a commercial service – it is not an objective source of information. In 2021 Google searches for information often provide results like these instead of independent information sources.