connectivity — AEJMC Hot Topics

How the World Is About to Get Even Smaller

By BEN BAJARIN on TIME, Feb. 21 –

“It may be difficult to imagine a world where human beings are even more connected than we are now. Yet the reality is that when it comes to connectivity, we’re barely scratching the surface in terms of where we’ll be in the future.

Many anticipate that this growth will be largely driven by mobile-connected devices like smart phones and tablets. To understand the scope of where we are heading with mobile computing, consider this data from a recent Cisco report:

The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population in 2012

There will be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices in 2016

Monthly global mobile-data traffic will surpass 10 exabytes per month in 2016

Over 100 million smart-phone users will each consume more than 1 GB of data per month in 2012

Global mobile-data traffic will increase eighteenfold between now and 2016

Mobile-network connection speeds will increase ninefold by 2016

Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016

Read more on the TIME’s website

Book Review – The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age

The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, eds. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 319 pp.

It was in 2006 when a New York Times Magazine piece suggested that the hyperlink may be one of the most important inventions of the past fifty years. Yes, that humble little link that helps people move around the Internet at lightning speed was just as important as the Internet itself. Maybe even more important. After all, what good would the Internet be if people could not move around it? If people had to put in computer codes every time they wanted to go somewhere, the whole thing would slow to a crawl. In fact, links are such an important part of the Internet that most people would scarcely recognize that a link is something different from the Internet.

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