Imagine, just for a second, that the internet didn’t exist. You still got all your news from newspapers, spoke to your friends on the phone instead of via social media and IM, and consulted printed and bound encyclopaedias instead of Google every time you had a question. Did you just shudder at the thought?
According to this infographic, if the internet really didn’t exist, we’d all be spending a lot more money on media and postage stamps and quite a few people (a couple of million) would be without a job, or at least doing something different to what they’re doing now. Think technology is killing jobs? It’s not — it’s just creating them in different industries. In the States alone, over a million people are employed directly by the internet.
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No one can deny the role that social media has played in facilitating political change, but can you really compare the time it took for the Egyptian revolution to oust Mubarak to the fall of the Berlin Wall? The internet has allowed protests to span the globe, but has also contributed to the rise of slacktivism — people may start tweeting about a cause, but driving real action and sustainable change is another thing entirely. The impact of some of these technologies obviously varies, but there’s no denying that the world would be a very different place without the internet.
Infographic courtesy of OnlineEducation.net
