https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/
Whenever you send a Facebook Friend request to someone whom you have never met before but they have many mutual friends, your respondent will often say "Hi, do I know you?". At this stage, you would feel awkward or disappointed that this person you're attempting to befriend online doesn't know much about you. By then you would choose to be honest and end the conversation on an awkward note or try to be smooth and miraculously elongate it into a long conversation. Since its invention on February 4 2004, more than 1.71 billion people are active on Facebook every month and over 1.13 billion people are active every day, on average. If Facebook is a country, it would be the 3rd largest country on Earth, behind China and India. You can connect any 2 anonymous people on Facebook to one another by an average of 3.57 degrees of separation. The average Facebook user connects to 155 other users (Facebook friends) but would only turn to 4 of them when in a crisis. On average, women have more connections than men do i.e. 166 compared to 145. In the USA alone, 82% of users are aged 18 - 29, 79% of users are aged 30 - 49 and 56% of users are aged above 65. Even family members between grandparents, parents and their grandchildren and children respectively are all connected on Facebook. Across the globe, according to a self-reported survey 56% of users are male whilst 44% of users are female but some people could identify themselves as the other gender as a lame joke. 39% of users have self-reported themselves as married or single, whilst 18% are in a relationship and 5% are engaged. Furthermore, 62% of users have experienced tertiary education as undergraduates, whilst 30% reported high school as the highest level of education they have reached. It is evident that Facebook is the most popular social media site for people of all ages. 1 in every 6 mins is spent on the Facebook website and 1 in every 5 mins is spent on the Facebook mobile app. The average human spends more than 20 mins a day on Facebook clicking the “like” icon over 4 million times a minute.
All of these statistics are not possible if not for a 19 year old male Harvard sophomore from Massachusetts; Mark Zuckerberg. He alongside his fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, initially created a social media platform only for Harvard students. However its membership expanded to neighbouring higher education institutions around Boston, Ivy League schools and Stanford University. There’s no record of the first ever users of Facebook but it’s proposed the first 3 users were likely tests Zuckerberg used and then deleted, so these profiles no longer exist. The 4th Facebook user ever is believed to the first ever real life one. Whenever you sign up to Facebook for the first time, you are assigned an ID Number depending on the cardinality of your signup such as (ID #99 - the 99th person ever to sign up to Facebook). The first 100,000 users were believed to be all Harvard students, or most of them are. I found an article revealing the first 20 real life Facebook users including Mark Zuckerberg himself at ID#1 in the following link:
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-ultimate-cool-kids-meet-the-20-first-ever-facebook-users-2012-2?r=US&IR=T#20-alana-v-davis-1
To find out what your personal Facebook ID is go to this website and type in your personal Facebook URL which you can find in your settings:
https://findmyfbid.com
My Facebook ID is 100,006,346,754,566 (100 trillion 6 billion 346 million 754 thousand 566th person to sign up to Facebook). What’s yours?
I always wondered who invented social media, what their inspiration was to invent something aimed to connect distant strangers and in what era? The earliest known methods of communicating across great distances involved written scrolls delivered by hand from one person to another, known as ‘letters’ in today’s language. The earliest form of postal service dates back to around 550 B.C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_post
2000 years ago, people used birds like pigeons to carry written messages. This ancient service is called ‘pigeon post’. Those pigeons flew to their destination in cages, where they would be attached with messages, then naturally the pigeon would return to its home where the owner could read their mail. It is likely the ancient Persians, Mughals and Romans used pigeon messengers during times of military action. Roman senator Sextus Julius Frontinus once said that Julius Caesay used pigeons as messengers in his conquest of Gaul during the 100s BC.
In 1794, Claude Chappe invented the non-electric telegraph which used a semaphore, a flag-based alphabet and depended on a line of sight for communication. In 1809, Samuel Soemmering invented the first crude telegraph where messages 2000 feet away at the receiving end could be read by the amount of gas produced by electrolysis. In 1828, the first ever electric telegraph invented by American inventor Harrison Dyar, which used electrical sparks through chemically treated paper tape to burn dots and dashes. In 1825, British inventor William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet which laid the founding for a large-scale revolution in electronic communications. In 1830 American Joesph Henry, and then in 1837 British physicists William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone used the principle of electromagnetism in their own telegraphs respectively. However it was Samuel Morse who successfully exploited the electromagnet in telegraph systems that was practical and commercially successful. While teaching arts and design at New York University in 1835, Morse proved that signals could be transmitted through wire. He sent pulses of current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper. This is known as “Morse Code”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code
In the following year, this device was modified to emboss the paper with dots and dashes. The modern Morse Code transmits text information using a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment or software to translate the message. The International Morse Code encodes the ISO basic Latin alphabet (Aa-Zz), a few additional Latin letters, Arabic numerals (0-9) and some punctuation and procedural signals (pro signs) as standardised sequences of short and long signals called “dots” and “dashes”, or “dits” and “dahs”, as in amateur radio practice.
Since the 1820s, many scientists have contributed to the invention of radio or “wireless telegraphy”. Experimental work that investigated the connection between electricity and magnetism were first conducted by Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampére, Joseph Henry and Michael Faraday. This then culminated in James Clark Maxwell proposing his theory of electromagnetism in his paper “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” in 1873. It wasn’t until 1887 and 1890 that the first transmission of electromagnetic waves performed by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz known as Hertzian Waves. Around the turn of the 20th century, Guglielmo Marconi developed the first apparatus for long distance radio communication. On 23 December 1900, Canadian inventor Reginald A. Fessenden became the first period to transmit audio or “wireless telephony” using electromagnetic waves over a distance of about 1.6 km. In Christmas Eve 1906, Fessenden also became the first person to make a public radio broadcast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio
However since 1890, the telephone rivalled the telegraph which would ultimately change the face of rapid long-distance communication. For years, there was a fierce debate who should earn the credit for the invention of the telephone. Charles Bourseul, Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey, amongst others, were all credited with its invention. The telephone we use in modern times was patented by Alexander Graham Bell as a means of an" apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically”. But the first ever telephone device was invented by Robert Hooke which was a string telephone that conveyed sounds over an extended wire by mechanical vibrations known as an ‘acoustic’, or ‘mechanical’ (non-electrical) telephone. On March 10, 1876, the first ever words spoken through the telephone speaker belong to Alexander Graham Bell who said these words to his assistant Thomas Watson: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telephone
Both technologies are still used today. The modern versions are more sophisticated than their predecessors. You can see telephone lines connecting directly to your home and radio towers which transmit radio signals allowing you to communicate with other people across long distances instantaneously.
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000984.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer
All of my blog posts are typed on a modern Apple Macbook featuring a modern qwerty keyboard with lights beneath it when used in dark places. All of my files, documents, pdfs and screenshots can be organised into individual folders and viewed in several different layouts to help me search for a specific document hidden deep within the catacombs of files. But in 1822 the first ever mechanical computer nicknamed the “Difference Engine” was invented by Charles Babbage (Father of the Computer) didn’t have these easy-to-use applications and complex computational instructions that could help me declutter my array of digital information and files. Instead it had instructions to compute several sets of numbers and made hard copies of these results. From the ancient abacus to the first ever computers during the Industrial Revolution, long tedious tasks have become automated reducing the hard yakka on us and specialised complex calculations that would normally take hours or even days to evaluate can be achieved within seconds. Every computer that we use today contain at least 1 processing elements like a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and some memory on your hard drive. These processing elements carry out every arithmetic and logical operation, and sequencing and control units change the order of these operations in response to stored information. Your keyboard, mice and joysticks are peripheral devices whilst your monitor screens, loudspeakers and printers are output devices. Modern touchscreen devices and various disk drives can perform both input and output operations. Your peripheral devices allow you to retrieve the information you need from an external source and enable the result of these operations to be saved and retrieved later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
By the turn of the 20th century, there was a rapid transformation and revolution of technology with the first ever super computers created in the 1960s by Seymour Cray at CDC (Control Data Corporation), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name. These supercomputers were the uber of your general-purpose computers. As of 2015, their performance is measured to be quadrillions of FLOPS (Floating-point operations per second) instead of MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). You would see supercomputers used in computational science, quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration and molecular modelling and physical simulations. Every supercomputer has their own network of protocols that spreads resources across a large number of nodes. Networks allow the exchange of data with each computing device using a data link between nodes via cable or wireless media but the connection was quite poor between computers. This required a network of networks called an internetwork in order for every computer and supercomputer to communicate with one another regardless of their location through radio, electric or wireless media. In December 1974, internetwork was abbreviated to Internet when the term was first used on the ITCP (International Transmission Control Program) protocol. After a series of experimental internetwork projects, on October 29, 1969 the first ever electronic message transferred between 2 computers over ARPANET. The exchange occurred between UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and programmer Charley Kline, and another programmer Bill Duvall at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). They attempted to type and send the word ‘login’ from UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host Computer to SRI. The L and O were successfully sent and arrived at SRI before the system crashed. Despite this setback, further technological advances would lead to the establishment of the World Wide Web in 1989. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW (W3) you and I use today is an information space where document and web resources are identified by URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), interlined by hypertext links and accessed via the Internet using a web browser and web-based applications. In 1990, the first ever web server and web browser was called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus. Here’s what the first web browser looked like running on the NeXTStep operating system:
In 1993, CERN announced that the Web would be free for everyone to use and develop which helped transform how we use the internet today. After the days of Commodore Amiga, Netscape Navigator, Windows and Mac OS, most of us use the following major web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari depending on which computing device you use. Today in the 21st century, there are over 1 billion websites with about 140,000 new websites every day. However about 75% of those websites are either decommissioned or don’t work anymore. So far the most popular websites all of us use today are:
- Dropbox
- Tumblr
- Spotify
- Foursquare
- MySpace
- Youtube
- Flickr
- Paypal
- Yandex
- Ebay
- Amazon
- Yahoo
- Altavista
- WWW Project
You can check out how many websites are on the internet right now live at this link: http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
I’m still improving on my blogging but I’m starting to get the hang of it despite the length of each of my blog posts. “Weblog" was a term coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, of the early blog Robot Wisdom, which reflects the process of “logging the web” as you browse. Weblog was then shortened to “blog” in 1999 by Peter Merholz and in 2004, Merriam-Webster declared “blog” as their word of the year. The blogging platform that I chose to use i.e. Blogger was established by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs in 1999 and it was one of the first blogging platforms to brought blogging to the mainstream. When the Adsense advertising platform was launched in 2003 to become the first advertising network to match advertisements to the content on your blog, many new bloggers started making money from their blogs although payments weren’t quite high. As of now there are more than 3 million blogs and counting with about 2 million new blog posts every day depending on the blogging site you use. Nowadays most popular and high-paying you tubers are video blogging or video logging, or Vlogging which gives viewers a live viewing or recording of the lifestyle and highlights their favourite youtubers are experiencing at the moment or prior to being edited.There are 2 types of vlogs: personal or live broadcasting.
On January 2, 2000, Adam Kontras posted the first ever and longest-running Vlog in history aimed at informing his friends and family of his cross-country move to Los Angeles in pursuit of show business. Recording yourself is the easy bit but preparing yourself for the camera and the things you’re about to share or discuss about is the hardest bit because that means many hours are edited out due to stuttering, awkward gestures, rude language or constant giggling. Most Vloggers are self-conscious of what they’re annunciating and often worry whether their viewers will find their content genuine, interesting and empathetic. You may argue that any editing will defeat the purpose of real recordings of their lives and begin to form conspiracies that the edited bits may contain content that may be deemed inappropriate, controversial and may reveal the phoniness of their lifestyles. It’s about maintaining the reputation, dignity and image of the media brand each youtuber and entertainer is selling to their worldwide audience i.e. you. They may be embarrassed and afraid of your reactions if they accidentally revealed the mistakes they make behind the scenes. We often forget that they’re imperfect because of all the editing. Like the common viewer they’re human too. They’re not also worried about the possibility of declining viewership, and inevitable hate speech from trolls and haters at any moment, but losing the major sponsors that fund their videos would be the worst thing that would happen to them. They work just as hard as any organisation, company or business group because they confine to the same concepts of a successful organisation like hiring trustworthy work colleagues, keeping an eye on finances, fun experiences, profitable outcomes and stressful workloads to complete tasks by tight deadlines.
If you post a photo of yourself, you are seen as seeking validation from your friends regarding your beauty which demonstrates your insecurity and lack of self-confidence in your own natural beauty. It also shows how society has discombobulated the definition of beautiful or sexy on social media and in real life. If you recently posted a picture, you have told the online community you are still alive and well. If you posted a picture of your travels, not only are you demonstrating your willingness to explore Earth, and its famous landmarks and heritage structures that still stand today, but you are also showing off how wealthy you are. Although you are enjoying yourself with your family or friends in a foreign country, there are many others back at home embedded in boredom, stress, routine work habits and hopelessness who would see these photos and would feel depressed and jealous of your luxurious travels. This is called FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. First identified in 1996, marketing strategist Dr. Dan Herman defined it as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” People with FOMO have shown to have a fear of regret which leads to a compulsive concern of missing out on opportunities for social interaction, novel experiences, profitable investments or other rewarding events. It perpetuates the fear of making the wrong decision on how to spend time as “you can imagine how things could be different.” This could negatively impact people’s psychological wellbeing and trigger negative social and emotional experiences like boredom, loneliness, depression, social anxiety and withdrawal. Although the internet allows all of us to connect with as many as people as we could ever imagine with the click of a button, we feel more alone doing this. In Vsauce’s video “The Science of the Friend Zone”, he states that we spend less time outdoors and more time indoors on our computing devices and smartphones than we were 50 years ago. Between 1965 - 1995, the amount of time people of all ages spent on informal socialising, hanging out with friends, attending parties, drinking at the bar or having informal conversations dropped from 85 mins/day to 57 mins/day. Around the same time period, the number of picnics fell 60% and the number of times we entertain our friends at home fell from 15 times/year to 8 times/year. It seems that the Internet has diluted the word ‘friend’ and we morally invented a new phrase ‘best friend’. Being social on the Internet isn’t the same as being social offline because instead of building upon real interpersonal relationships, it more or less builds upon a stage for us to focus on ourselves in the presence of other people. Virtual online communities can select users with similar interests, age group, gender, races and values and filter those ‘bad apples’ who aren’t obedient enough to follow instructions, are irresponsible for their own words and actions, and attempts to mock those around them just for attention. But real life doesn’t give us the option to filter out those we don’t want to interact with. We have to cope with the diversity and the exposure to a plethora of people we never imagined to have existed in our community. Although we respect their presence with simple greetings, a meek smile and a helping hand to ensure their safety and comfort if we’re nearby, but we aren’t inclined to converse with them because of the anonymity of the stranger and the ambiguity of their personality.
On another note, if you are living in a society that accepts freedom of speech, you are giving haters and trolls stimuli and the opportunity to pick out the imperfections and cement abusive judgments of your appearance in the comment section. Furthermore, if your photo is seen as arousing and too sexual, your photo may be copied by blackmailers and scammers without your consent and knowledge. In recent years, I hear many news stories regarding people especially women sending naked pictures of themselves to those who they have a crush on without the knowledge of their current significant other. Depending on your occupation, society frowns upon these actions and inevitably calls for these people to resign from their position and face the hammering sentences passed down by society’s laws. The matter of fact is society is punishing people who are exerting limerence which is a normal biological process. The laws aren’t intimidating to elicit a fear factor within us because our brain values the rewards of sex and love much more highly than the consequences of doing so. I feel society’s justice system, created by humans, is designed to control our birth and death rates keeping things in order and disciplined. The universe we live in prefers chaos over order. According to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics,
ΔS = Change in Entropy
T = Temperature (Kelvin)
ΔH = Change in Enthalpy: (+)H = Endothermic, (—)H = Exothermic
ΔG = Change in Gibb’s Free Energy
ΔG = ΔH — TΔS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
Nowadays on the internet we see so many memes that we can relate to depending on our age. The word ‘meme’ is a neologism coined by British Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”. It is a shortening of the Ancient Greek mimeme meaning “imitated thing” from mimeisthai, “to imitate”, from minos, “mime”. A meme is a virally-transmitted cultural symbol or social idea. A majority of today’s memes involve photos or screenshots of infamous movie scenes accompanied by captions that are intended to be funny, often in a way to publicly ridicule common human behaviours, choices, clichés, trends and generalisations. Memes can also come in video form or common verbal expressions from a particular persona of people. Other rare memes have heavier and philosophical content. The most commonly used font in meme captions is “Impact”. The caption is more often than not written in white capital letters with each letter bordered in black strokes at size 72 pt. You can make your own memes with your own photos on Meme Generator: https://memegenerator.net. In 2013, Dawkins defined “meme” as a way for cultural information to spread across a community depending on the culture and environment of the Internet. He characterised an Internet meme as deliberately altered by human creativity - distinguished from biological genes and mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication explained in Darwinian selection. He explained that Internet memes were more of a “hijacking of an original idea”. Which memes will die out or survive the test of time depends on not 1 person but all of us. Whichever we find the funniest and give the most positive reception will most likely be reused the most by social media, web search engines, internet forums, social networking services, news websites and video hosting services. Some Internet memes can evolve and spread rapidly more than others, occasionally reaching worldwide popularity within a few days catching the attention of both researchers, industries, marketing, advertising and news outlets. Also I have witnessed many trends and Internet challenges many youtubers and media entertainers conduct on a daily basis like:
- Water Bottle Flipping
- Try Not to Laugh
- Mannequin Challenge
- Dabbing
- Pass or Smash
- Duck-faces
- Candid shots
- Makeup Tutorials
- Facial expressions to failed attempts at entertaining their audience
- Floor is Lava
- Musical.Lys
- Guess Her Age
- Try Not to Cringe
- Try Not to Sing Along
- Don’t Judge
- Try Not to Cry
- Reactions to Funniest Kids Notes, Test Answers, Texts (From your Ex), Dumbest Tweets, Creepiest Kids Drawings, Funniest Names, Mind Tricks, Creepiest Text Messages, Worst Pickup Lines or F**kgirls.
- Dirty Mind Test
Most of you may find it hilarious whilst some of you will find it weird, gross, disgusting, boring, awkward and you can’t resist labelling them stubborn, stupid or disgraceful. Despite these mixed emotions, why do we still watch them? Is it because we’re bored, nothing to pick on, something to criticise? Or is it because you’re experiencing juvenoia like life wasn’t as interesting and enjoyable, and jokes weren’t as funny like in the good ol’ days? Entertainment doesn’t care what we feel as long as we open and watch their videos or photos for any given length of time because that’s how they compile the views and popularity hence more money to their pay checks. What does the future of the Internet look like? What new trends will become viral amongst the entertainment industry and social media networks? What makes something viral? I will answer these questions in another post.
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