I was curious about how quickly internet access has grown worldwide over the past two decades, so I visualized the percentage of people using the internet globally.
The dataset comes from the World Bank World Development Indicators, which tracks global development metrics.
The growth is striking — from very limited adoption in the early 2000s to a majority of the world's population being online today.
Data source: World Bank – Individuals using the Internet (% of population).
I generated this chart directly from the CSV dataset while experimenting with a lightweight visualization workflow.
by Still-Alternative-64
3 Comments
Based on this, I’m going to speculate that 50% is the tipping point beyond which the human race completely lost herd immunity to disinformation.
Technically you could use it well before 1990. You just didn’t have such convenient interfaces or http protocols. There was LOTS of porn out there you could download even in the early 80s (which if you were stupid you could do …. looking at you university students on a monitored mainframe)
So 2019 is the first full year where the Global Internet Adoption hit >50%
Way more late than I expected
Just shows how disconnected people were from all the information even just a few years ago