Читать книгу @stickyJesus - Toni Birdsong - Страница 11

The speed of change and the numbers are staggering when you consider what is happening around you. Perhaps you are familiar with some of these statistics.³ If not, be prepared to have your thinking rocked.

 It took radio thirty-eight years to reach fifty million users; television, thirteen years; the Internet, four years; and the iPod, three years. In just a nine-month period, Facebook added one hundred million users, and downloads of iPhone applications reached one billion. (That's billion with a b.)

 Print newspaper circulation is down seven million over the last twenty-five years. But in the last five years, unique readers of online newspapers have increased thirty million.

 Collectively, the television networks ABC, NBC, and CBS get ten million unique visitors every month, and these businesses have been around for a combined two hundred years. YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace got 250 million unique visitors each month after being launched for only six years.

  In 2008, Barack Obama leveraged online social networks to raise $500 million and mobilized young voters via social networking at unprecedented numbers. He outpaced opponent John McCain in fundraising online by five times.⁴

 Ninety-six percent of people born between 1980 and 1994 have joined a social network.

  Nielsen research reveals that Americans spend a quarter of their time online; a third of that time is spent communicating across social networks, blogs, personal e-mail, and instant messaging. The world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites.

  One out of every five couples married in the U.S. met via social networking.

Still think using social media is a fad or a waste of time? You may soon join the ranks of these leading, albeit well-meaning, thinkers:⁵

"Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure ."

—Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology , on Thomas Edison's light bulb, 1880

"We have reached the limits of what is possible with computers."

—John von Neumann, infamous mathematician and pioneer of quantum mechanics, 1949

"The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty— a fad."

—The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903

"Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, willflop—because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds."

—Time, 1966

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."

—Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926

"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition."

—Dennis Gabor, British physicist, 196