If we were asked to name a phenomenon that has impacted the world more than any other in the 21st century, we would not hesitate before saying “the internet.” According to the last statistics released by the data research company, Internet World Stats, there are more than 5 billion users of the internet on the face of this Earth today. Divide that number by the world population and you will be able to decipher that approximately two-thirds of the global population use the internet today. Want to know something even more shocking? Strategy Analytics – a top-notch market research firm headed in Newton, Massachusetts – has declared that as many as 35 billion devices will be connected to the internet by the end of the first quarter of this century. Just for comparison purposes, that number is more than a hundred times larger than the number of citizens of this country! Another measure of the scale of the internet’s growth is the large number of internet service providers (ISP) that exist – seven thousand – and the deals that they offer. You can easily search for “Xfinity packages” and the deals of other providers.
As with anything that has a lot of influence on the human race, countless questions are asked about the internet. While some wonder whether cable or DSL internet is more reliable, others spend their time discussing the impact the internet is having on the Perhaps, the most commonplace inquiry is regarding what constitutes the term “internet” and what does not. If you are the type of person who finds themselves thinking about the latter, this article is ideal for you! We say this in confidence knowing that we will be delving deep down into what is meant by the word “internet.”
What Is The Internet?
The term “internet” represents a lot. The internet is controlled by as many as 75 million servers at different locations around the world. It uses massive underwater cables called the “underwater backbone” to connect people between oceans. The total length of the underwater backbone is estimated to be more than 550,000 miles. The world’s leading tech giant, Google, stated that the total amount of data amounts up to be approximately 5 million terabytes. That is two billion times more than the data used for the high-quality 2-hour movie you just watched on Netflix! Given the figure was released by Google a while ago, this number can only be expected to have increased.
The World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the biggest application of the internet. It includes a large number of web pages that are linked to one another. These pages can be categorized into three main parts:
- Surface Web: The web pages of the surface web can be accessed by anyone and are indexable on search engines. They usually do not require any login credentials to open. Fifteen billion pages exist on the surface web.
- Deep web: If the fifteen billion web pages of the surface web sounded like a lot to you, you will be amazed to know that the deep web is about five hundred times larger than the surface web! It consists of pages that cannot be indexed. The pages usually require some login credentials to be accessed.
- Dark web: The deepest part of the deep web is the dark web. It is used for communicating the most secret things. Criminals often use the dark web to ensure anonymity.
Social Media
The World Wide Web may be the largest application of the internet when it comes to the amount of data involved. However, social media applications are definitely the ones that the human race spends the most amount of time on. The average person spends about two and a half hours on social media each day. If you subtract eight hours each for work and sleep, that is almost half of your life! Social media is used by more than half of the world’s population – the approximate figure was 3.8 billion in 2021 and it can only be expected to have risen since then! Facebook is the most popular of all the social media apps with a whopping 2.6 billion users. Not far below is Instagram – a social media app that also has over 2 billion monthly active users. Ironically, both Facebook and Instagram are owned by the same parent company – Meta. The name of the parent company shows that, in the future, social media can be expected to create an alternate universe for us.
Conclusion
We hope this article has helped you understand the meanings behind the words “internet” and “social media” and how they relate to one another. We also hope you have gained a better sense of how these two phenomena impact the human race. Wishing you the best of luck for your next discussion on the internet!
