So are we living in the age of the visual internet? A push toward visual content on the internet is shaping up to be one of the most visible (double entendre fully intended) trends of our age. “Photos, videos, graphics and more are taking over our online experience,” writes the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo in Welcome to the Post-Text Future. In response, our corporate overlords are spending big to get us even more hooked on multimedia consumption.

In 2017, we collectively watched a bn hours of videos every day, according to YouTube. With our brains being hard-wired to love visual content, and developers getting more attuned to what attracts our attention, it is little wonder that 2019 was deemed the year of visuals.

Visual IoT: The proliferation of visual content is also significantly impacting the so-called visual Internet of Things (IoT), a network of devices — usually equipped with scanners or cameras — that collect visual data from the internet to streamline administrative or logistical tasks such as scanning boarding passes at the airport or tracking movements on CCTV. Visual IoT’s role in the growth of new internet monitoring techniques is crucial, although we tend to hear less about it than about AI, Big Data, analytics, and the main IoT. “From the food people eat to the transport we use, from the centres we visit for shopping and leisure to the way our homes are managed and [how] we care for the ill and vulnerable, visual data can play its part,” writes Information Age editor Nicholas Ismail.