Exponential Times in the Information Age

Gone are the days of chalkboards and letter posting in the developed world. The sale and consumption of hard-copy books is fast dwindling at the hand of the Kindle and other eReaders. If Wikipedia were to be published as a book it would be over two million pages long. There are now even babies in Egypt named “Facebook.”

3D graphics has reached a point beyond comprehension five years ago. The number of gaming devices and controllers now on the market can have one gleefully immersed 24/7, if you have the time. The exponential rate at which new game titles are being released has made the task of writing letters to Santa quite a meticulous one.

In 2007, one out of every eight U.S. couples met online. It is now estimated to be one in five. When television first entered our lives it took 13 years to reach a target audience of 50 million. Facebook took just two years to get the same number of people on board its platform.

Greater than the exponential development of technology, is the exponential availability of information. It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information that anyone living in the 18th century could have consumed in their entire lifetime. The amount of technical information available is more than double every two years.

This exponential growth of technology and information is changing the way children are educated. Students are now being prepared for jobs that don’t yet exist and being trained to use technologies that have not yet materialised. It has also been shown that students who are online tend to outperform those who receive more face-to-face education.

This is of course changing the way that people are employed globally. It is estimated that 95% of companies that are online today recruit people using LinkedIn; around the same percentage of businesses use social media for marketing purposes.

In 2008, more than 200 million cell phone calls were made every second. This has roughly tripled every 6 months since. In 2009, every minute or so, a day’s worth of video footage was uploaded to YouTube. In 2010, the number of Google searches completed every ten minutes could have powered Las Vegas for half an hour. This year there are roughly 80 million Farmville farmers versus the 1.5 million real farmers. The moment you’ve finished reading this, most of this information will be outdated.

This information was derived from a series of YouTube videos called "Did you know?" A search for that should bring them up. It was interesting to compare the figures and stats offered in each consecutive year: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Hard to predict how things will progress from here!