Skip to main content

Blogs and Cell Phones

Social Media. One item of note today is the great preponderance of cell phones, blogs, twitters, and Facebook.  There are a dozen or more others, as you know.  The question I pose here is why?

The Worldwide Data.  All numbers given are estimates, as there is no clear methodology for such data collection ('cept maybe cell phones) as there is for medical conditions, educational information, voters, religions, and the like. 
  • Cell phones: There are  an estimated 5,980,000,000 mobile accounts worldwide, greater than the world population. Mobile accounts out number land lines 5:1. India and China account for at least 30% of this business. 
  • Blogs: There are more than 160,000,000 blogs and 75% of that number are blog readers.  Some estimates are vastly higher.
  • Twitter: There are at least 500,000,000 accounts, with more than 170,000,000 tweeting daily. The average visit time is more than 11 minutes.  People tweet, organizations tweet, religions tweet, even governments tweet.
  • Facebook: There are 850,000,000 accounts, with more than 240,000,000 checking in daily. 
Forget the commercialization.  Forget the technology. Look deeper.  Something is happening!

The Conclusions.  This is an explosion of a fully new type in the history of mankind.  Innate in us there seems to be a need for a deep and unfulfilled sense to communicate with others.  This is beyond any reason, except perhaps we are looking past the only five we have of hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste for a new sense, a sense of frequent and constant communication. With Twitter, the communiques are quick and short with little long term value.  With the cell phone, it seems that many of us (like all of us) have a need to talk with others. With Facebook, we see the need to broadcast personal information to followers, things that would hardly be brought up in conversation or possibly things that might only be brought up in personal conversation. Do you know?  With Blogs, like the others, there is in many a need to send a message to friend, to family, and more generally to the world population at large.  Some blogs are deep philosophical discourses, many on politics, many more on religion; others are newsy day-to-day happenings.  The latter is sort of a distributed personal or phone conversation to a great many, all at the same time.

The explosive preponderance of these social media express an internal social desire of man never before witnessed on earth.  There is some thing within us we haven't seen before that  I do not understand. 

Yet I blog about it.  :)

References:
Mobile phoneshttp://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#subscribers
Twitter, Facebook, etchttp://thesocialskinny.com/100-social-media-mobile-and-internet-statistics-for-2012/
Blogs: http://blogandretire.com/blog/tag/how-many-blogs-are-there

See: used-ideas.blogspot.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behavioral Science and Problem-Solving

I.                                       I.                 Introduction.                Concerning our general behavior, it’s high about time we all had some understanding of how we operate on ourselves, and it is just as important how we are operated on by others. This is the wheelhouse of behavioral sciences. It is a vast subject. It touches our lives constantly. It’s influence is pervasive and can be so subtle we never notice it. Behavioral sciences profoundly affect our ability and success at problem-solving, from the elementary level to highly complex wicked problems. This is discussed in Section IV. We begin with the basics of behavioral sciences, Section II, and then through the lens of multiple categories and examples, Section III. II.     ...

UNCERTAINTY IS CERTAIN

  Uncertainty is Certain G. Donald Allen 12/12/2024 1.       Introduction . This short essay is about uncertainty in people from both secular and nonsecular viewpoints. One point that will emerge is that randomly based uncertainty can be a driver for religious structure. Many groups facing uncertainty about their future are deeply religious or rely on faith as a source of comfort, resilience, and guidance. The intersection of uncertainty and religiosity often stems from the human need to find meaning, hope, and stability in the face of unpredictable or challenging circumstances. We first take up the connections of uncertainty to religion for the first real profession, farming, noting that hunting has many similar uncertainties. Below are groups that commonly lean on religious beliefs amidst uncertainty.   This short essay is a follow-up to a previous piece on certainty (https://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2024/12/certainty-is-also-emotion.html). U...

Robin Hood and Cliven Bundy

  Actor Herbert Mundin, playing Munch in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood (starring Errol Flynn) is charged by Prince John's troops of slaying a royal deer in the royal Sherwood forest.  The punishment is death.  Though the events of this film are a portrayal of events dating to the 15th century, they became by the 19th century a "robbing from the rich for the poor" theme so often depicted in other film genres. The William Tell legend is another. The plot is simple.  A poor man desperate to survive tastes the forbidden fruits owned by the authority, and is condemned. I would love to hear this event debated on the current TV news shows.  On the one hand, Munch would be a champion in service to his family.  On the other hand, his legal rights are restricted by legal authority. so, the argument would proceed.  Legal scholars cite statutes chapter and verse, while others would root for the common man.  Fast forward to 2014. Parallels ...