To be quite honest, numbers don't tell you everything because audience reactions differ. Some of the biggest films at the box office are not necessarily films that everyone has loved, they just opened to a good response.
The evidence that things are changing fast can be seen in the dramatic increase in the influence of blogging. We should be collecting emails as we used to collect telephone numbers and using them to better communicate our message to key voters.
This night I hold an old accustomed feast, Whereto I have invited many a guest, Such as I love; and you among the store, One more, most welcome, makes my number more.
Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.
Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.
There is no need to mention the great difference between the amount of satisfaction there is in just oneself being happy and the amount of satisfaction there is in an infinite number of people being happy.
It is a matter for considerable regret that Fermat, who cultivated the theory of numbers with so much success, did not leave us with the proofs of the theorems he discovered. In truth, Messrs Euler and Lagrange, who have not disdained this kind of research, have proved most of these theorems, and have even substituted extensive theories for the isolated propositions of Fermat. But there are several proofs which have resisted their efforts.