Really The Largest Populations

We are all aware of the minuteness of our nation. We score just less than half a million people and cannot stop but wonder at the sheer volume living in countries such as China, India, the USA and Brazil just to name a few. For the curious ones, the statistics are as follows, 1.44 billion, 1.39 then 332 and 213 million respectively.

These are populations that one can board a plane and visit but the context of this article is for populations that unite nations and reside on the web. China’s total population is dwarfed by these two that we are about to discuss and the difference in between is still considerable.

When we connect online we engage in this virtual nation be it a social media platform or simply to surf the net. One can definitely assume that at some point nearly every country is connected.

Statistical websites indicate that users surfing on Facebook on a single day amount to an exorbitant 1.8 billion which in comparison is vastly more than the population of China. Whereas on a monthly basis the statistics show that it takes the combined values of China and India to barely exceed Facebook’s usership. While the social media platform hosts 2.7 billion users, the two huge nations amount to 2.8.

We are now able to marvel at the connectivity that the Internet brings along. If one platform can connect so many people irrespective of the long distances between countries, what does the web itself bring to the table? For the year 2020 that value was 4.66 billion which to be fair there is not much of a gap for just a single website (Facebook). One might think that in time it will cover the same value as the web in its entirety.

I can hear someone asking about these exorbitant values and those of the population of the world. Well, for the time being, the world wide web covers fifty-nine per cent of the global population and that number is expected to grow.

This is the unreleased translation of an article published in the Maltese language on Siltiet Qosra on the 24th of February 2021.