There is a famous chart which shows the time it took for various technologies to be adopted by 50 million people. From its introduction, the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users. For radio, it was 38; for television, 13; for the world wide web, merely four.
Online services are faster still. Facebook reached the 50 million mark in two years, YouTube in ten months, Twitter in nine months. Pokémon Go reached the same watermark in 19 days — as did Pornhub. (For the benefit of the uninitiated, Pokémon Go was a 2016 augmented reality game where you used your phone to catch animated monsters; Pornhub is a helpful website which kindly reminds men to set their laptops to ‘mute’ after their wives have gone to bed, to avoid waking them.)
These figures are frequently used as evidence that the world is speeding up. But it takes only a little critical thought to realise that these are far from like-for-like comparisons.
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