When Is the Internet Awake? [infographic]

Internet by day, internet by night; everyone is on the internet at some point. Whether you’re a college student cramming for an exam with a Facebook study-break, or a middle-aged parent catching up on burning through some episodes of Lost, everyone’s got their own time of the day that they like to surf the world wide web. According to Bárd Edlund, as a whole, most of the internet is awake around 9 am EST. With this world clock he’s collected probability data for 25 countries accessing the internet at a given time of 24-hour day. The x axis describes the time of day by shade of gray (lighter being earlier in the day, and darker shades later in the night), while on the y axis shows the different countries via moon-like circles. The circle size describes the amount of people with internet broadband subscriptions.

This chart is only an rough guide though. Just because a country is awake doesn’t mean that they are necessarily online reading your tweets. It’s meant to be a way of thinking of how the world realizes their sleep schedules and how it could relate to internet surfing. So I guess it’s a good reason to have these posts available around 8 am after all. via

Answer: 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. That’s when the largest number of people in the world are likely awake (and on their computers), according to designer Bård Edlund. How he arrived at that conclusion is in many ways more intriguing than the conclusion itself.

Edlund created a world clock, which animates the probability that the Internet is awake or asleep in 25 countries at any given moment of the day. Time stretches along the X-axis and is represented by shades of gray; the darker the gray the later the hour. Countries, represented as moon-like circles, fill the Y-axis. The larger the moon, the more people in the country with broadband subscriptions (“a decent measure of the most ‘important’ countries in the digital age,” Edlund tells us). At the top of the animation, a clock keeps track of the exact hour.

As time passes, the moons move back and forth across the chart, drifting in and out of darkness and revealing the probable sleep patterns of broadband subscribers. So when the majority of the moons lines up in daylight, chances are that your tweets will have the biggest captive audience. Conversely, when the moons line up in darkness--sometime between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m. EST--you might as well wait till morning to share your brilliance with the rest of the world.

Obviously, the chart is only an approximate guide. Just because people with broadband subscriptions might have their eyeballs open at 3 p.m. doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re reading your tweets--or even that they’re online. But Edlund is trying to make a broader point about how we perceive time. “I've seen some world clock tools that tell you what time it is anywhere in the world, but I was interested in trying to do something that kind of abstracts the notion of time a bit, the way we do when we talk/think about it,” Edlund tells Co.Design in an email. It’s true. We never say 9:01:45. We say “morning.” And maybe if Edlund’s chart catches on, we’ll start saying, “Time to tweet.”