People are scrolling through 90 meters web content every day – that’s the same as the height of the Statue of Liberty

JEDDAH: People scroll through 90 meters of web content every day – that is the same height as New York’s Statue of Liberty, according to Facebook’s Regional Director in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Ari Kesisoglu.

And by 2020, that number will likely double from the current four billion, as internet usage and reach continue to grow, Kesisoglu said at the TopCEO18 forum at the Bay La Sun Hotel in King Abdullah Economic City on Wednesday.

Kesisoglu said that since the beginning of time until 2003, when the internet began to boom, humanity has generated approximately five billion gigabytes of information. “Every 10 minutes, we create that amount of information now,” he revealed.

But he said the brain’s processing power would be aided by the growth in the content we consume.

According to a study in 2001 found that the human brain could process a single thought in 0.3 of a second. The same study was repeated again in 2014, and the human brain had developed in order to adapt to media changes and internet feed into processing a thought in 0.03 of a second.

IN NUMBERS

• 80 percent of Internet users will be using a mobile messaging app by 2020 - currently only half of the four billion with Internet access use such apps.
• People stay five times longer on video content than that which is static
• 40 percent of mobile users leave a website when it doesn’t load in 3 seconds.
• We scroll 90 meters of content in a day, Usain Bolt sprints 100 meters in 9 seconds

 With the rapid pace at which the internet is developing, and our brains leaping to keep up, “by 2020, the majority of the world will be connected to the internet,” Kesisoglu said.

“There is going to be a massive gap between content creation and our ability to consume content, and that gap will continue grow because of our brains and how powerful they are.”

He predicted that our dependency on our mobiles and the internet would continue to grow – but this same growth in reliance, he said, would make people more vulnerable to the devices they hold so dearly.

To emphasize his point, he told delegates to unlock their phones and hand them to the person on their left. “How does that feel?” he asked, as the audience struggled to smile in spite of their evident discomfort. “We cannot ignore how important mobiles are,” he added.

Despite the apparent reliance on technology by so many, its advancement will leave millions back on the job market, Kesisoglu explained. As many as 5 million jobs will be lost to AI, robotics and nanotechnology according to a recent World Economic Forum report.

But there is a line of thought that suggests that these same technologies will ultimately lead to a reskilling of the workforce – and half of that will be millennials by 2020, he said.

 THE LIST:
Jobs that weren’t available but became possible because of the evolution of the Internet:

• AI engineer
• Cloud specialist
• App developer
• Drone operator
• Vlogger/blogger
• Social media consultant
• Autonomous car engineer
• Big data analyst
• Uber/Careem driver