One Second on the Internet attempts to quantify our relationship to the Internet via Facebook likes, Reddit votes, and emails, among other variables. This doesn’t sound all that interesting—it’s not news to anyone that we use the internet a lot.However, it’s one thing to superficially acknowledge our Internet use and it’s an entirely other thing to see it laid out before you in all its nakedness and truth. The actual numbers aren’t important—on One Second on the Internet, it’s the sheer volume of virtual activity that is utterly engrossing. The Internet may be a tool for communication, but sometimes, the ways we use it can inspire speechlessness.Real time visualizations, like this one, are powerful stuff. More dynamic than infographics, they reveal the Internet as the living organism it is. Visualizations take what we think we know about the Internet—that it is an unstoppable force whose depths have yet to be fully probed—and make it all the more vivid, though not necessarily easier to grasp.One Second is neither the first nor the last of these tools—it is just the latest. The other day, we brought attention to another, the droney real-time sonification of Wikipedia edits, which allows you to both see and hear the editorial shape-shifting of the encyclopedic beast. Now, allow us to implode your mind with you two other real-time feeds of Internet activity.TweetpingTweetping appears to have been born sometime in early 2013. Designed by Franck Ernewein, it depicts real time Twitter usage on a worldwide map. The level of detail is staggering: total number of tweets, total number of words, tweets by country, most recent hashtags and mentions. In the time this morning I spent mesmerized by the ever-changing blue hues of Tweetping, I watched countless bizarre and revealing hashtags fly onto my screen (#Sexyoffers, #YoloSwag, #DontDieThisWeekend) and learned that Africa doesn’t really use Twitter all that much.emojitracker
emojitracker comes with an epilepsy warning, and while neither I nor the developer know if the site would actually cause a seizure, it is definitely not the easiest visualization to look at for long periods of time. Each possible emoji is listed next to a real time count of how many times it has been tweeted.There are a lot of blinking green boxes indicating that information has been updated (which, as you can imagine, happens pretty much every millisecond). While it might not be the most beautiful of visualizations, there is something positive to take away from it: the number one most used emoji as of this post’s publication is the heart at around 77 million tweets. On the Internet, where snark reigns supreme, that's a little bit encouraging, right?These tools are both astonishing and sobering. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our Internet usage, but as the One Second website reminds us, none of this existed thirty years ago. So that leaves us with the question: What were we doing with our seconds then?
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