What will the Internet minute of the future look like?

Every now and again one of those “what happens in an Internet minute” infographics appears on my LinkedIn feed, and I always take a look. It’s fascinating to me how our online behaviour and daily habits have changed since the Internet came into being. As with so much in life, there are fierce debates and various deeply held convictions about exactly when this was – and even what the Internet actually is – but for the purposes of drawing a line in the sand, I’m going back to 1989, when the World Wide Web first appeared.

I couldn’t find a handy visual summary dating back to those early days (will someone now prove my lack of search prowess by producing one?), but if it does exist I’d imagine it includes a lot of blank space, a big question mark, or maybe some cartoons of people with furrowed brows.

I think it’s fair to say that it took a while for us to figure out exactly what we could do with this network of computers and information sharing protocols; it was only introduced to the public in 1991, and by New Year’s Day 1994, it’s estimated that there were just over 600 websites in total across the entire Internet. Interestingly – for the pizza enthusiasts – this was also the year when Pizza Hut rang up one of the first known Web purchases. It was a large pepperoni with mushrooms and extra cheese, in case you’re wondering.

Apart from that, much of the early activity seems to have centred on chatting and emailing, rather than surfing. And even at that, the volumes were nothing like those of today. If you’re anything like me, you might still fondly remember a time when checking your inbox meant going in maybe once a day to deal with five or six emails. Happy days.

Fast forward to 2017 – taking in the introduction of the smartphone and other smart devices –  and, well, there isn’t much that we can’t do online these days. You can buy pretty much anything, from a hairbrush that doubles up as a selfie stick, to the “No Phone” (designed to wean you off your smartphone if you spend too much time on it) and waste time on all sorts of sites that are designed to amuse, or just be weird, and even do some productive things too, like running a business, or your daily routine.

Putting online access directly into our hands and our pockets has created a seismic shift not only in Internet traffic itself, but also in how we access it. A little less than a year ago, the numbers of web pages being loaded on mobile devices overtook those on desktop and laptop computers for the first time and this is bound to continue in the near future.

What’s more, our smartphones have changed the very things that we are doing with the connectivity at our fingertips. Noticeable in the “Internet minute” statistics for 2017 is a progressive rise in our desire for content – whether photos, videos, TV series or music, with all of the major players seeing continued growth.

Just as one example, Netflix revealed in its latest ratings data that binge-watching is on the up; 8.4 million of us have now watched at least one season of a Netflix original series within 24 hours of its release. We are also shopping more, messaging more (with Snapchat seeing a phenomenal rise in use), swiping dating sites more and logging in to social media more.

But what can we expect from the Internet minute of the future? Let’s assume that, in some sense, both the Internet and our concept of time are going to stick around. Here are some of my guesses at the numbers we’ll be crunching:

• The rise in web traffic via smart, wearable (or even implanted) devices. A while ago I wrote about my longing for a self-ironing shirt. It’s doubtful whether this will come to pass, however advances in smart textiles – like the Levi’s? Commuter Trucker – are designed to get us the content we need, without even having to look at a screen.
• In a similar vein, as digital assistants become more integrated into our daily lives, we’ll start to see a decline in physical keystrokes and a sharp increase in voice-activated commands. The big question remains whether the assistants will ever get to grips with a Dutch accent…
• Thinking more about smart devices, we will be surrounded by them. Consider it a sort of benign domestic army – cars, fridges, vacuum cleaners, you name it – all of these devices (and more) will be sending and receiving data constantly, pushing online traffic on a massive upward curve.
• They’re not yet part of the mainstream for most of us, but virtual and augmented reality experiences will take off in many different ways. I doubt they’ll put a serious dent in the travel industry, at least in the early days, but we should start to see significant growth in the number of experiences people can have, or join, without having to be physically present in a specific location.
• Thanks again to various wearables, monitors and chips, along with developments in artificial intelligence, we’ll be tracking our health statistics, risks and solutions with more accuracy than ever before.
• With massive gains to be achieved in financial services innovation, cryptocurrency transactions will surely become the norm.
• Last, and definitely not least – if we accept that our destiny is to become infinitely more connected to technology and to one another, spyware and security solutions will come even more to the fore. We’ll be cheering the number of hacks and malware attacks that are foiled as a matter of course – every single minute.

What are your thoughts?

Photo credit: Steve Austin