The
increasing use of internet in the modern era
By
Sohaib
Azam
Two
things concerning the internet are no secret in today’s world: 1) That the use of
internet has been increasing since its introduction to the public in the early
90’s and 2) that it has become the standard for business and personal use in
recent years. There are literally more than a hundred statistics out there and
several different sites that post these statistics. Instead of boring my
audience with a bunch of stats that might seem obvious or useless, I would like
to use this blog to write on some very notable stats that are worth sharing
(all taken from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm):
1) In
2000, the internet’s early years, there were only 360 million internet users
across the world. That number has jumped up to over three billion out of seven
billion people living on this earth, which is nearly half of the population.
2) In
Africa, 4.5 million people accessed the internet in 2000, but that number
jumped significantly to over 300 million in 2014 which is almost a 7000 percent
increase. One would not regard Africa as a place where internet use is rampant
the way they would with Europe and North America so this increase is notable.
3) The Middle East also saw a significant
increase from 3 million in 2000 to 113 million in 2014. This is over a 1000
percent increase in a 15 year span.
4) On
the same site, you will also see that Asia and Latin America experienced
significant increases in internet usage as well.
5) North
America has almost 90% of their population accessing the internet while Europe
has more than half of their population using the internet.
There
are many statistics and websites out there that detail internet usage, but they
all convey the same message: that internet usage has increased significantly
since its early days and that is not likely to change in the years to come.
While this is an obvious point to most people out there, what might have not
been obvious was that regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Latin
America experienced major increases in internet use, even though these areas
would arguably not be seen as technology hubs the way North America and Europe
would be seen.
There may very well come a day where internet
use reaches near 100% in the world. With such increasing and widespread use of
the internet in the modern era at such a fast pace, it is that much more important that businesses
take advantage of this increase by utilizing the online world to their success.
Building a website for their business if they do not already have one is a good
start to taking advantage of this trend.
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