The Growth of Data

If you haven’t noticed, it is now the year 2015.  Another year has gone and passed and as the human race we are now more technologically advanced than ever before.

It was 46 years ago when the first message was sent between two computers, and it crashed after sending only the second letter in the message. Then 22 years later the first website went online, but it contained only 153 words. From there things just go better, quicker, fancier and even a bit more reliable. Eleven years after the first website, in the year 2002, we had about 500 million internet users worldwide. That was about 9% of the world’s population at the time.  In that eleven years the total number of websites also grew from just the one to 3 million. Another decade went by and in 2012 we had quadrupled our number of internet users to a little over 2 billion, which was about one third of the world population. Also the average web page loading time had halved since 2002.

Now come present time, things have just gotten crazy, and definitely much quicker. Here are just a few of the things that happen in only one second across the world wide web: 51 items are purchased on Amazon, 52 thousand facebook likes, 34 million emails sent, 8 thousand snapchats sent (now that is a lot of selfies!), 1 thousand hours worth of pandora music is streamed, 1.6 hours worth of video is uploaded to youtube (and that is a lot of cat videos), and 22 thousand gigabytes of data are transferred worldwide. Think of all the seconds it took you just to read what happens in one second. Almost incomprehensible all that happens on the web.

The amount of information we have at our fingertips is incredible; and it is growing exponentially. There is no denying how quickly our world is being filled and pretty much overran with data. Almost everything we do nowadays uses the internet and the instantaneous transfer of data across thousands of miles. It is all handy and dandy but the time has come for us to ask questions like, “How can we stay on top of the growth of data?” and ” Is technology progressing in the best way possible?”

We would love to hear your thoughts on the growth and progression of data and technology and the implications it might impose and/or breakthroughs you think it might lead to.