Reports Of The Web's Death Appear To Be Greatly Exaggerated
This beautiful, shocking and totally misleading graphic was exhibit number one in yesterday's talk-of-the-town article from Wired. The headline was, "The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet."
The Web, in deep red, is in a 10-year decline. The graphic and the article made the case that the Web is giving way to apps as the most important way we use the Internet.
The article has many well-reasoned and interesting points about how the way we, as users, are changing our Internet interactions. It talks about the quality of our experience. The article is about what works for us, as people, who connect with other people, ideas, businesses and entertainment electronically.
The graphic, however, shows "Proportion of Total U.S. Internet Traffic." "Traffic" is data. Of course video is exploding in pink, because video takes a huge amount of data. I can watch a couple of things on Hulu and it dominates the amount of data I consumed in a day, even if I spent way more of my time reading blogs, because text is very little data.
The graph isn't wrong, it's just not measuring the same thing the article is about. The graphic is about megabytes. The text is about, in the words of the article, "human nature."
I'm going to guess that Wired went with this graphic because it's way easier to measure data than people. I don't even know how you would begin to chart user experience, personal preferences and all of the other things the article is built around.
One other point: Possibly even more misleading is the way e-mail use shows up. E-mail is steady in light blue in the 1990s and then, around 2000, it starts to decline until it is almost nonexistent today. I get and send way more e-mail now than I did in 1992. The disconnect between my user experience and the light blue is because it shows proportional data use. E-mail was a larger percentage of Internet traffic in 1992 because there was much less Internet traffic overall. Now, we are shoving so much video and other high-volume content through the pipes that I can send all the e-mails I want and it won't show up in this graph.