words Al Woods
In today’s society, life without the Internet seems like a prehistoric idea, with network connection being the basis of everyday communication for many. Different people utilize the Internet for various purposes.
However, one thing’s for sure – during times of a global pandemic, being able to communicate throughout the virtual world is a necessity for many job sectors.
Even though the beginnings of the Internet date back to the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 1980’s when the researchers began to assemble the network of virtual connections that allowed for the technological progress that eventually led to the Internet as we know it today.
We prepared a list of 5 amazing facts about the Internet, which you might not have known about yet, so prepare to learn new information that you can always use in any conversation and shock your friends with those fascinating facts. No need to thank us!
The Amount of Users
The Internet hit an astonishing 4.3 billion users in 2019, which is 56% of the world population. And the numbers are growing every day, with more users joining the virtual world than ever before. This is a tremendous growth from 1995, where only 1% of the world’s population was connected to the Internet. As of 2020, the number from the previously mentioned 2019 statistic has increased to approximately 4.57 billion users being active on the web.
In terms of global use, more than half of all the internet users worldwide are based in Asia, with around 640 million users coming from China alone. Expanding the statistics even further, that is double the amount of the population of the United States. Now that’s a surprising fact you can shock your friends with during any conversation!
Users with Disabilities
Nearly 57 million Americans suffer from some form of disability, ranging from difficulties while operating a mouse pad to cognitive and visual impairments.
To accommodate the disabled users to use the web freely, websites are ordered to adapt their features to be accessible for people with various disabilities. Today, website designers are required to follow AODA compliant standards, which allow for features such as a sound transcriptor for people with hearing impairments or magnifying features to accommodate people with visual impairments.
A common misconception is that people with such disabilities tend not to use online services, however, this is a myth as according to a Princetown survey, 54% of adults living with a disability go online. In fact, for some people living with disabilities, using the Internet is a much more convenient method than using other formats to access knowledge or communicate. Because of that, it’s more important than ever for websites to apply features that will allow people with disabilities to access their contents easily.
It is not only ethically irresponsible for companies to not adapt the required AODA standards to accommodate people with disabilities on their websites, but it’s a large market sector that they’re losing out on. Considering that nearly 1 in 4 Americans suffers from a disability of some kind, failing to make a website easy to navigate for all people will make businesses lose out on a big pool of potential customers.
Mobile Use
You may not have known that, but in 2014 the Internet’s mobile use exceeded the Internet’s use on PC devices for the first time in history. This comes as a result of many new devices being introduced to the market, such as modern smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, which allow easy access to the web from all places. The times of having to be confined to your desk to utilize the Internet are over, and with new technologies being developed daily, it’s not surprising that such an increase in the mobile use of the Internet can be seen.
However, it may seem like it’s only been a couple of years from when the Internet made an introduction to mobile phones, but this is a misconception that we will debunk. The development of modern smartphones indeed allowed for more convenient access to the web, but the first implementation of the Internet on mobile phones, goes back to 1996, with The Nokia 9000 being the first Internet-compatible phone.
Search Engines
It may not come as a huge surprise, but Google was the most popular search engine of 2020, receiving traffic of around 79 billion visits every month. The popular search engine also secured a market share of approximately 88%, with Bing and Baidu coming after them. To emphasize the massive scale that Google operates on, it is worth mentioning that the popular search engine processes an average of around 40K search queries each second.
Those numbers are growing rapidly, with Google receiving more and more traffic every year, which does not necessarily come as a surprise, considering that if you’re reading this article, you probably stumbled upon it after using Google search!
Internet Addiction
It may seem like the Internet is the perfect place to explore various aspects we may need help with while also conducting research, educating ourselves, shopping, and many more. However, it’s also a place that can be quite addictive. Internet addiction is much more common than you may think, with research showing that nearly 61% of Internet users are addicted.
Thus, the Internet can also be a threat, with countries such as China already implementing help camps for addicted users.
Concluding
The Internet is an invention that changed the world like almost nothing before. The ability to accomplish so many things in such a short time by simply clicking on a few buttons has fuelled the travel industry, creating traffic for businesses and creating new jobs that have not even existed 25 years ago. However, with the various benefits that the Internet provides for its users daily, it’s easy to start spending too much time online and fall into an unhealthy addiction. That’s why in times such as now, you should ensure that you’re not spending too much time looking at your computer screen and try to find ways to interact with the world without having to do so virtually at all times.
