It was a quiet Tuesday today in Queens until I stumbled upon this very sleek video and the walls of Mead Manor shook with the pounding beats of what my young staffer told me was ‘electronic’ music. As my readers may know, I have been writing about the 10 global trends that will shape the decade ahead; the video below addresses the overarching trend–the unprecedented acceleration of change and growth–that I described as the driving force behind the cultural, economic, political and social currents of the 2010s.

I have transcribed the most relevant parts:

“We are living in exponential times: There are 31 billion searches on Google every month. In 2006, this number was 2.7 billion. … The first commercial text message was sent in December of 1992. Today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the total population of the planet.

Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million…

Radio: 38 years
TV: 13 years
Internet: 4 years
iPod: 3 years
Facebook: 2 years.

The number of internet devices in 1984 was 1,000.
The number of internet devices in 1992 was 1,000,000.
The number of internet devices in 2008 is 1,000,000,000.

There are about 540,000 words in the English language—about 5x as many  as during Shakespeare’s time.

It is estimated that a week’s worth of The New York Times contains  more information  than a person was likely  to come across  in a lifetime  in the 18^th century.

The amount of new technical  information is doubling every two years.”

For those interested, the creators of the video list their sources here.