Reading Assignment 10

Starting the Counter...

I am writing this blog post about the class we had this last Tuesday, the 12th I believe. During this class we were shown a counter by Prof Condon at the beginning of class that counted a number of statistics per second that had to do with social media and actions taken on the internet. The idea behind the counter is that at creation it gathered how many twitter accounts and post are being made per second, avg email sent per second, facebook accounts and revenue generated per second...etc and then compiled all of these times into an algorithm and converged them all onto this counter showing what has been done since the counter has started.

This counter is supposedly showing me the internet growing, or to be more specific, how these certain social media sites are growing along with information being sent between users. But, I guess that is how things like Youtube and Twitter grow, they only grow when users trade information. You upload a video and Ill watch it. Ill tweet and you read it, possibly retweeting it to other twitter friends. Ill link to a funny picture on Facebook and youll look at it. What this counter does is put something that we never really think about into perspective, it figuratively shrinks the internet. It is showing you the viewer what is probably happening in quasi real time. Here at this moment, this is what is happening.

It is hard to grasp at how big the internet is and this is obviously not a real check on how big it really is, but no matter it is still kind of frightening isnt it? Personally I consume information online as if I am the sole person looking at something at that moment. Even when on something meant to be social like reddit or Facebook I have this feeling where I am accessing a terminal away from other people. But to finally have shown to you the fact that millions and millions of others are doing the same exact things as you at that second is kind of mind boggling. While the numbers we are dealing with here are very big, just knowing that the entirety of these actions on social sites can be compounded makes this place seem just a bit more controllable.