What used to be large
Posted on:: October 25th, 2005
They agreed with [Tim] Bray that the number of pages is increasing dramatically, finding that the size of the Internet seemed to double between October and November, 1995, going from 1.3 million to 2.6 million HTML documents.
Tim also noticed that average page size had remained consistent at 6,500 bytes. (From “The Dublin Core and Warwick Framework: A Review of the Literature, March 1995 – September 1997″ by Harold Thiele.) [Tags: internet TimBray OpenText]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I have to ask, “what is large?” Last evening at the Mind, Media and Society course seminar at the McLuhan Program, I introduced Eric McLuhan’s notion of the “electric crowd.” Among its attributes are that all electric crowds are the same size: they are infinitely large and fit in zero space (this, according to our experience of them when we are part of one.)
Eric’s discourse pertained mostly to the electric crowds created by the conventional mass media. Thus, the growth of webpages (and the blogosphere as a particular sort of instantiation thereof) can be considered to be the “leavings” (or “droppings,” if you prefer) of all those infinite electric people.