fbpx
Digital communication

How has the digital world changed?

If you are my age (or older) you remember a world pre-internet. At times it still amazes me how far we have come since I started my career in communications.

The other day I was thinking back to what it was like when I started out…Do you remember what the digital world was like in 2002?

Only 53% of Australian households had home Internet access. The internet was used on average for 46 minutes a day to visit around 3 million websites. The most popular search terms were Spiderman and Shakira. ICQ was the most popular social networking site at the time with more than 100 million users. Facebook didn’t exist, neither did Myspace, Twitter or Instagram.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/the-internet-was-kind-of-terrible-in-2002-infographic-2012-08/

A decade later (2012) the number had grown to 2.27 billion internet users, who accessed the web for 4 hours a day. In 2002 Internet Explorer was the dominant browser in 2012 only 39 per cent used Internet Explorer with Firefox and Chrome becoming more popular. There was one messaging app that had limited uses.

Now there are more than 4 billion internet users worldwide, who spend an average of 6 hours a day online. Smartphones are the world’s preferred choice for going online, accounting for a greater share of web traffic than all other devices combined. There are around 3.2 billion social media users across huge billion dollar platforms, there are 687 million Facebook accounts. 1.7 trillion people purchased items online.

Source: https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018

We are now in a world where we need to consider how our content will be accessed by smart devices, how chatbots can provide better customer service and how artificial intelligence will further change our landscape.

It’s insane to think of how quickly digital communications evolved over a short span of time. I wonder how the Internet will change over the course of the next decade.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *