3 March 2024 by Mondo2.0

Dear Social Network, you’re not what you used to be

Everyone, absolutely everyone, is talking about artificial intelligence; we have decided to bring our “dear old” Social Networks back to your attention, travelling companions that have suddenly fallen off the radar of journalists and the media, pushed aside, as mentioned, by all kinds of speculation about the future of A.I.

Also because the WeAreSocial indicators (April 2023) bear witness to a mass phenomenon that is still significant today:

  • More than 4.80 billion “social media user identities”
  • An increase of 150 million “social media user identities”, +3.2%
  • 2h 24 minutes spent daily on social networks (out of a total daily 6h 35m spent on the Internet, 36.5% of Internet use takes place on Social Networks, with a slight decrease in daily presence: -5 minutes)

Basically, compared with 2022, we do not see a significant difference in daily usage time, just as the increase in social media user identities is interesting but not stratospheric; Social Networks have probably already reached their maximum in terms of participation.

Behind these figures, which indicate a stable phenomenon that is still influential today, we see important differences in terms of use, which we highlight below:

  • Some social media users have begun to perceive the consequences of excessive exposure of personal images, facts and opinions; or perhaps they simply no longer want to share the “usual posts” and have run out of ideas.
  • There are more and more passive, or mainly passive, users who prefer to observe and read on Social Networks, sometimes commenting on posts made by others. If you think about it, “if I write less” I do not risk being misunderstood; moreover, I am not obliged to attract attention through my posts, and I do not risk being banal.
  • This trend is transforming Social Networks from “multicast” tools, where all nodes (users) impulsively communicate with all the others, into “broadcast” tools in which more popular transmitting individuals communicate with numerous receivers. Put simply, a large proportion of Social Network users have got into the habit of scrolling through news and posts written by others.

We write fewer posts, we scroll through thousands of them, we have entered a phase of passive in-depth exploration; we depend on viewing news and videos published by others.

Obviously, not everything is as it was two decades ago: we are not facing a TV with a limited choice of channels and a schedule established in advance; we have countless alternatives and, perhaps precisely for this reason, we have decided to browse them, scrolling through them quickly.

  • The spread of smartphones and the possibility of using increasingly fast, high-performance networks have shifted attention towards multimedia content, photographs and, even more, short videos. Among the hundreds, thousands of pieces of content we scroll through, videos dominate; from “compulsive writers” we are turning into “multimedia omnivores”.

The 2023-24 Social user exposes themselves less and has partially reinvented themselves as a spectator.

All in all, Social Networks appreciate this mode for three reasons:

  • the significant reduction in content generated “from below” is an advantage in terms of hardware/server resources (space needed to store information).
  • many influencers, widely followed on social media, are part of the advertising machine. Their centrality feeds the process of enhancing brands and those who invest in Social Networks.
  • the more videos and photographs I scroll through and explore, even quickly, the more advertising comes to my attention.

Other factors have very probably encouraged these new dynamics:

  • the habit of streaming huge quantities of videos, files and series. Thanks to on-demand platforms, which are increasingly widespread and “within reach of our wallets”, the need to assert oneself has been replaced by the daily ingestion of multimedia content.
  • Many of us have moved from the need to be on display, to be social, to a visual dependence on multimedia content generated by others; even “visual” inputs can generate dependence.
  • Debate on social media has often become highly polarised; users who post content “from below” are sometimes — perhaps it is more accurate to say increasingly often — driven by extreme opinions touching on the personal, political and social spheres; they exaggerate. Faced with these excesses, many users have sensibly decided to take a step back and limit themselves to browsing news, photos and videos.

On 28 November 2021, on this same blog, we told you about “the involution of social networks”, highlighting Zuckerberg’s evidently premature effort to shift attention towards the metaverse, in the face of a Social Network interface and modes of use that were emotionally and visually stalled.

In March 2024 we describe Social Networks that are more to be watched than participated in; a dynamic that, probably with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, and therefore the automatic production of content, will only become more pronounced: A.I. will generate content, and all of us will stand by listening to it and watching it.

“Dear Social Network, you have changed, you’re not what you used to be, we don’t talk to each other as we once did; you will tell me that I too, as a cyber-user, have changed a lot. You’re right, perhaps we need a pause for reflection before A.I. comes between us.”

We were television viewers, we became Internet users and protagonists of our own content, we learned to exaggerate, to hate each other online; now we are gradually returning to being passive consumers.

Who knows what else awaits us.

Mondoduepuntozero