According to the July 26, 2010 print version of Newsweek:
There are 141 million active blogs, up from a mere 12,000 ten years ago.
Daily e-mails are up 20 fold from 12 to 247 billion in the same period.
Daily Google searches are up 20 fold to 2 billion.
Text messages are up from 400,000 to 4.5 billion.
We spend six times as much time online; from 2.7 hours a week to 18 hours per week.
The cost of hard-drive storage has dropped from $10 to 6 cents per gigabyte.
Yet daily letters mailed has dropped only a little 207.88 billion to 175.67 billion, the number of daily newspapers from 1,480 to 1,302.
What does all this mean? I really don’t know, but the cynic in me doubts that we’re better informed as a result, but I could be wrong. More data, more information, and more opinions do not automatically translate into more wisdom. In fact the more we are overloaded with information the more we seemed starved for wisdom.
I do think that we are defining some new sense of community especially when the new social media are thrown in. It is distant enough to be less likely to be civil that personal contact, but the individualized nature lets everyone set rules of conduct. It is so much easier to stay in touch with friends and family there may be some real positive impacts on family and community networks.
How this digital community affects communities that are geographically defined will be interesting to see.
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