Ever hear of the expression “Drinking from a fire hose”? Well, in politics, it’s “Sipping from a Tsunami”. The amount of information in one day’s time will now will no doubt take years and years to sift through. It will crush any person’s reason as to why they think they are correct, or better than others, in politics. It renders even the most highly esteemed college professor ineffective.
The number of websites
Researching how many websites there are, I came up with a range of 1.13 to 2 billion websites. Around 18% of them are active and maintained. So we’re roughly in between 200 and 400 million websites that are active and maintained. How big is that? If we apply the 100 to 27 rule (If somebody does something 100 times a day, it will take 27 years to do it a million times) then seeing anything more than 90% of them is not possible. The big question is how many of these websites talk about politics. There is no answer I could find. But let’s start with one…..
YouTube
YouTube uploads 271,330 hours of video every day. That’s 82 years’ worth of video! How much of that talks about politics? Considering politics is in everything nowadays, there has to be at least a year’s worth. This is just one website too, so immediately, the content on this platform goes well beyond a person’s 24 hours on the internet…. by a wide margin.
Blogs
There are roughly 600 million blogs. Of course, the majority are inactive, but they still pump out an estimated 6-7 million blog posts. So how much of that is tackling political topics? Who’s to say? But I’ll bet it’s into the tens to hundreds of thousands at least.
Podcasts
Podcasts run the range of 2.5 to 5 million in my research. Most answers are closer to 5 million. I’ve seen active podcasts out of the number to be at least 450,000. So there’s got to be a good number there talking about political topics. Again, way beyond a person’s 24 hours.
Forums
I saw a few numbers for sites like Reddit and they are staggering. I didn’t post any of the numbers here for forums total, because there are several outside of Reddit. Politics is flying on these with posts about politics vastly outnumbered by the comments. To track down everything that comes out in one day here would too, be a monumental effort.
Facebook and Twitter
Counting both status updates and comments on this behemoth, it amounts to 800,000 entries per minute. How much of that is politics is anybody’s guess. Twitter clocks in at about 350,000 tweets a minute. Of course, a lot of the back-and-forth communication is said with some stank on it aimed at other people, but they are still different perspectives nonetheless.
Books
Ah, books. A lot of people think because they are well-read, that it somehow makes them better at politics. Nope. Not when you see how many books have been published or are published every year.
Yikes! So if a person to me brags about reading a hundred books a year, that means absolutely nothing to me. Not to dismiss the educational benefits of reading of course, but when it comes to books on politics, nobody is going to be able to keep up.
It’s not about what a person has, it’s about what they have missed
Within 24 hours, a person is going to miss an astronomical amount of politics. You add that people need to sleep, maybe work a job, and spend time with friends and family, then you have an even smaller window during the day to dedicate to politics.
A not-so-hard truth I have to apply to myself is that I’m definitely missing a good amount of information. So, knowing this, I simply just listen to other people tell me what they picked up. Then I add it to my knowledge base and keep going. Basically, I don’t argue with people, I harvest them.