Schlagwort-Archive: Social Media

Facebook has just turned 20 years old, and observers say: Social media has moved from places of exchange to places of passive consumption. Is that correct?

“Sorry, but Instagram sucks now,” was the title of a journalist in her article in “Vice” magazine. The author criticizes that the app shows too much advertising and too much irrelevant stuff like healthy recipes. „If it continues like this, Instagram will soon end up with the other social media zombies.“ She means, for example, Facebook. Because this platform is no longer what it once was.

Once upon a time, you could watch your friends explore all of Europe via Interrail, fidget to your favorite song in the club, paint a picture with watercolors or adore your new partner. You always stayed in touch via direct message – whether with your school colleagues or your holiday love. Instead, short videos, pictures and memes from accounts that you don’t actually follow are now appearing in the timeline. At best, an older relative posts a photo of her garden or a tasteless calendar saying.

On both platforms, this is due to the changed algorithm that the Meta Group introduced around two years ago. It ensures that users are no longer shown primarily what they want to see themselves, but rather what Instagram and Facebook believe is relevant to them.

This upsets quite a few people. A journalist from the online magazine “Krautreporter” says he mainly sees advertising and contributions from influencers. “I often wonder whether real people still post on social networks,” he continues. In another article he states: „Social media is dying out.“
Is it really over?

A similar sentence could recently be read in the Economist. The newspaper published an article entitled „The end of the social network“ to mark Facebook’s 20th anniversary in February. The cover photo shows an emoji with an offended expression about to sink into the sea. People would post less, the text says. The proportion of Americans who like to document their lives online has fallen from 40 percent to 28 percent since 2020. Can it really be that the time of social networks is over?
Woman with smartphone
Apparently people have less desire to document their lives online than before.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

Anyone who reads the entire article in the „Economist“ will quickly realize that it’s not about declaring social media dead. Rather, there is talk of a transformation: the social aspect of social media is being lost. While they were originally intended to combine personal and mass media communication, that is now changing again. The two functions would gradually be separated again. Status updates from friends have given way to videos from strangers; Postings would no longer be posted on Facebook and Co, but rather on messenger services such as Whatsapp or Telegram.
The new logic

The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” (“NZZ”) analyzes that all of this is just the logical consequence of a development that has been going on for some time. In the early days of Facebook, users would have seen all posts regardless of their quality. It didn’t matter whether they actually interested her – the photo of a lunch, the selfie in the park, the crude thoughts about world events, all of that just appeared, in chronological order. Whoever had the most followers had the largest audience.

In 2009, Facebook began sorting posts by popularity. Whatever was liked the most was displayed at the top. Since then, the “closest circle” of friends and family has become increasingly less important, according to the “NZZ” analysis.

Recently, the Meta Group has also become increasingly oriented towards Tiktok. The app from China is particularly popular among younger people. Users can upload short videos there that are accompanied by music. Anyone who is on Tiktok will always see content from other people’s accounts. Ingrid Brodnig, a digital expert, isn’t surprised: „Facebook and Instagram have probably noticed that this is helpful so that people stay tuned.“ From the mass of posts, an artificial intelligence automatically selects those that the person in front of the screen might like. At the same time, fewer contributions come from friends.
Let yourself be showered

Brodnig also noticed what other observers stated: „The social aspect of social media has become less.“

The trend is rather to let yourself be showered. „Tiktok, for example, works more like RTL 2 than like a classic social medium, which is about interpersonal exchange.“ On Tiktok, a minority publishes the majority of posts. Or to put it another way: A few show themselves, many others watch them – unlike what was previously used to on social networks, where everyone revealed something.

The fact that many people no longer have as much desire to expose themselves online does not only apply to the USA. In Austria it is also currently evident that young people are using social media less. The disillusionment began years ago when “people lost their jobs, for example, because they posted something on Facebook while drunk.” False reports, hate comments and ridicule would have done the rest. „If you get angry because you post your lunch, you might think: Then I won’t post or I’ll post less often.“

 "If you get angry because you post your lunch, you might think: Then I won't post or I'll post less often." (Ingrid Brodnig, digital expert)

So who provides all the content? Influencers, politicians and people “with a great need to communicate”, for example with a political issue, says Brodnig. But also media and companies that want to advertise their products. Most others, however, are tired to a certain extent and prefer to sit back and consume. „The funny thing about it is that it’s not that noticeable because the feeds are of course designed so that we see the active ones. We don’t see that our friend Anna hasn’t posted anything for seven weeks, Facebook wouldn’t have any of that.“
Shifting to private groups

So if social networks are primarily there for consumption and the exchange shifts to private chats and chat groups: What are the consequences?

It could become a problem that messenger apps such as Whatsapp or Telegram are not moderated. Of course, this poses risks. In India, politicians used WhatsApp to spread lies – which might soon have been deleted on a platform like Facebook, according to the Economist. “Especially during the pandemic, you could see that a lot of misinformation and conspiracy myths were being spread via messenger apps,” says expert Brodnig. Furthermore: One should not believe that things are always peaceful and mindful in chat groups; debates would escalate there too.

Another possible consequence is that “social media will become a main entertainment channel,” says Brodnig. This is difficult, for example, for protest movements for which social media is an important place for networking. The expert also fears that an already very emotional public debate will be further emotionalized: „Tiktok is a system in which upsetting videos may have a good chance because people will stick around for longer.“
Not all bad

But not everything about it is bad. Brodnig suspects that people today should think more consciously about what they want to reveal about their private life and what they don’t. “We learned not to have to post everything.” Enjoying the moment seems to be more in vogue again. The channels would now also be viewed more critically. „When social media was new and fresh, there was a lot of enthusiasm. People thought: Wow, I can connect with my high school friend who I haven’t seen in ten years, or message friends from Argentina.“ Now many have recognized the dark side. „I believe that the golden age of social media is over.“

By the way, some are of the opinion that the future of platforms lies in their past. Unless they return to what they once were, they would surely perish. But are they right? The number of users on Instagram has grown steadily and is expected to continue to grow. So even though people are tired of posting, even though they’re annoyed – they stick with it.

The High Cost of Living Your Life OnlineConstantly posting content on social media can erode your privacy

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https://www.wired.com/story/privacy-psychology-social-media/

Constantly posting content on social media can erode your privacy—and sense of self.Photograph: Luka Milanovic/Getty Images

To be online is to be constantly exposed. While it may seem normal, it’s a level of exposure we’ve never dealt with before as human beings. We’re posting on Twitter, and people we’ve never met are responding with their thoughts and criticisms. People are looking at your latest Instagram selfie. They’re literally swiping on your face. Messages are piling up. It can sometimes feel like the whole world has its eyes on you.Being observed by so many people appears to have significant psychological effects. There are, of course, good things about this ability to connect with others. It was crucial during the height of the pandemic when we couldn’t be close to our loved ones, for example. However, experts say there are also numerous downsides, and these may be more complex and persistent than we realize.Studies have found that high levels of social media use are connected with an increased risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression. There appears to be substantial evidence connecting people’s mental health and their online habits. Furthermore, many psychologists believe people may be dealing with psychological effects that are pervasive but not always obvious.

“What we’re finding is people are spending way more time on screens than previously reported or than they believe they are,” says Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “It’s become somewhat of an epidemic.”Rosen has been studying the psychological effects of technology since 1984, and he says he’s watched things “spiral out of control.” He says people are receiving dozens of notifications every day and that they often feel they can’t escape their online lives.“Even when you’re not on the screens, the screens are in your head,” Rosen says.One value of privacy is that it gives us space to operate without judgment. When we’re using social media, there are often a lot of strangers viewing our content, liking it, commenting on it, and sharing it with their own communities. Any time we post something online, thus exposing a part of who we are, we don’t fully know how we’re being received in the virtual world. Fallon Goodman, an assistant professor of psychology at George Washington University, says not knowing what kind of impression you’re making online can cause stress and anxiety.

“When you post a picture, the only real data you get are people’s likes and comments. That’s not necessarily a true indication of what the world feels about your picture or your post,” Goodman says. “Now you’ve put yourself out there—in a semi-permanent way—and you have limited information about how that was received, so you have limited information about the evaluations people are making about you.”Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatric and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, says we construct our identities through how we’re seen by others. Much of that identity is now formed on the internet, and that can be difficult to grapple with.“This virtual identity is a composition of all of these online interactions that we have. It is a very vulnerable identity because it exists in cyberspace. In a weird kind of way we don’t have control over it,” Lembke says. “We’re very exposed.”

Without the ability to find out how their identity is ricocheting around the virtual world, people often feel a fight-or-flight response when they’ve been online for many hours—and even after they’ve logged off.

“It’s kind of an adapted hyper-vigilance. As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response,” Lembke says. “That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”It would be one thing if only you saw any negative reactions, Lembke says, but they’re often available for everyone to see. She says this exacerbates feelings of shame and self-loathing that are already “endemic” in the modern world.We are social creatures, and our brains evolved to form communities, communicate with each other, and work together. We have not evolved to expose ourselves to the judgment of the whole world on a daily basis. These things affect everyone differently, but it’s clear many people regularly feel overwhelmed by this exposure level.

If we’re not careful, our online lives can become a source of chronic stress that subtly seeps into everything. Everyone needs some privacy, but we often don’t provide it for ourselves and end up feeling like we’re constantly battling invisible enemies.

There are things you can do for yourself, however. You can turn off your notifications for social media apps, reduce how much time you spend on them, limit when you allow yourself to use them, and more. Goodman says it sometimes helps to keep your phone in the other room so you’re not so easily tempted to pick it up.Lembke says we need to change how we think about social media and internet use as a society. She calls it a “collective” problem, not just an individual one.“We need to come up with a kind of cultural etiquette around what appropriate and healthy consumption is, just like we have for other consumptive problems,” Lembke says. “We have nonsmoking areas. We don’t eat ice cream for breakfast. We have all kinds of laws around who can buy and consume alcohol, who can go into a casino. We need guardrails for these digital products, especially for minors.”

Tech companies tried to help us spend less time on our phones. It didn’t work.

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Last year, tech companies couldn’t get enough of letting you use their products less.

Executives at Apple and Google unveiled on-device features to help people monitor and restrict how much time they spent on their phones. Facebook and Instagram, two of the biggest time sucks on the planet, also rolled out time spent notifications and the ability to snooze their apps — new features meant to nudge people to scroll through their apps a little less mindlessly.

These companies all became fluent in the language of “time well spent,” a movement to design technology that respects users’ time and doesn’t exploit their vulnerabilities. Since the movement sprang up nearly seven years ago, it has invoked mass introspection and an ongoing debate over technology use, which people blame for a swath of societal ills including depression and suicide, diminished attention spans, and decreased productivity.

But a year after Big Tech rolled out their time-well-spent features, it doesn’t seem like they’re working: The time we spend on our devices just keeps increasing.

Fortunately, the problem might not be that bad in the first place. Though correlations exist, there’s no causal link between digital media usage and the myriad problems some speculate it causes.

“Every time new tech comes out, there’s a moral panic that this is going to melt our brains and destroy society,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, told Recode. “In almost every case, we sort of look back at these things and laugh.”

What “time well spent” has done is spurred a whole cottage industry to help people “digitally detox,” and it’s being led in part by the big tech companies responsible for — and that benefit from — our reliance on tech in the first place. As Quartz writer Simone Stolzoff put it, “‘Time well spent’ is having its Kendall Jenner Pepsi moment. What began as a social movement has become a marketing strategy.”

Politicians are also jumping on the dogpile. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has proposed a bill to reduce what some call social media addiction by banning infinite scrolling and autoplay and by automatically limiting users to spending a maximum of 30 minutes a day on each platform. The bill currently has no cosponsors and is unlikely to go to a vote, but does demonstrate that the topic is on lawmakers’ radar.

These efforts, however, have yet to dent our insatiable need for tech.

The data on device usage

By all accounts, the time we spend attached to our digital devices is growing.

American adults spent about 3 hours and 30 minutes a day using the mobile internet in 2019, an increase of about 20 minutes from a year earlier, according to measurement company Zenith. The firm expects that time to grow to over four hours in 2021. (Top smartphone users currently spend 4 hours and 30 minutes per day on those devices, according to productivity software company RescueTime, which estimates average phone usage to be 3 hours and 15 minutes per day).

We’re spending more time online because pastimes like socializing that used to happen offline are shifting online, and we’re generally ceding more of our days to digital activities.

The overall time Americans spend on various media is expected to grow to nearly 11 hours per day this year, after accounting for declines in time spent with other media like TV and newspapers that are increasingly moving online, according to Zenith. Mobile internet use is responsible for the entirety of that growth.

Nearly a third of Americans said they are online “almost constantly” in 2019, a statistic that has risen substantially across age groups since the study was conducted the year before.

Not all our online activities are on the uptick, however.

Online measurement company SimilarWeb has found that time spent with some of the most popular social media apps, like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, has declined in the wake of “time well spent” efforts — though the decline could instead reflect the waning relevance of those social media behemoths. At least for now, the average amount of time on those apps is still near historic highs:

Since overall time spent online is going up, the data suggests we’re just finding other places online to spend our time, like with newer social media like TikTok or with online video games.

Some have argued that sheer time spent isn’t important psychologically, but rather it’s what we’re doing with that time online. And what we’re doing is very fragmented.

Rather than use our devices continually, we tend to check them throughout the day. On average, people open their phones 58 times a day (and 30 of those times are during the workday), according to RescueTime. Most of those phone sessions are under two minutes.

Even on our phones, we don’t stick to one thing. A recent study published in the journal Human-Computer Interaction found that people switched on average from one screen activity to another every 20 seconds.

And what’s the result of all these hours of fragmented activity? Just one in 10 people RescueTime surveyed said they felt in control of how they spend their day.

What to do with our growing smartphone usage

It’s tough to separate finger-wagging judgments about tech from valid concerns about how tech could be degrading our lives. But the perception, at least, that tech is harming our lives seems to be very real.

Numerous articles instruct people on how to put down their phones. And richer Americans — including the people making the technology in the first place — are desperately trying to find ways to have their kids spend less time with screens.

MIT’s Zuckerman suggests building better “pro-civic social media,” since he thinks it’s already clear we’re going to spend lots of our time online anyway.

“I am deeply worried about the effects of the internet on democracy. On the flip side, I was deeply worried about democracy before everyone was using the internet,” he said. “What we probably have to be doing is building social media that’s good for us as a democracy.”

This social media would emphasize the best aspects of social media and would better defend against scourges like content that promotes political polarization and misinformation. He gave the example of gell.com, which uses experts to outline arguments for and against major social issues, and then encourages user participation to further develop and challenge the ideas.

Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, thinks we’re overusing the language of addiction when it comes to technology usage. If we really want to limit our technology usage, he told Recode, solutions are close at hand.

“We want to think that we’re getting addicted because an addiction involves a pusher, a dealer — someone’s doing it. Whereas when we call it what it really is, which is distraction — now in the US, we don’t like to face that fact — that means we have to do something that’s no fun,” Eyal said.

Instead of blaming tech companies, he asks people, “Have you tried to turn off notifications, for God’s sake? Have you planned your day so that you don’t have all this white space where you’re free to check your phone all the time?”

For those who are addicted — a percentage he says is probably in line with the portions of the population that are addicted to anything else, like alcohol or gambling — he thinks tech companies should notify users that they’re in the top percentiles of usership and offer them resources, such as software tools and professional assistance (and his book).

In the meantime, the time we spend on our digital devices will continue to increase, and there’s still a need for conclusive research about whether that actually matters. Perhaps while we wait for clarity, we can turn off our notifications about how much time we spend on our phones.

Source: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/6/21048116/tech-companies-time-well-spent-mobile-phone-usage-data

How writing about your own industry makes You an Irresistible Job Candidate

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How writing about your own industry makes You an Irresistible Job Candidate?

By Alexis Grant

When it comes to standing out online, your best bet is to offer your own original content. Blog posts or tweets that revolve around your unique ideas will make you a standout candidate.

But the truth is, not everyone has the time, writing ability or even confidence to grow a quality blog or social media account, and plenty of people who don’t have a blog still want to move up the career ladder, into more challenging and better-paying positions.

What if there was a way to show the world just how smart you are, without creating your own content?

Well, there is, and it’s a tactic you should seriously consider: sharing other people’s content.

Whether you curate on Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr or all of the above, here are five things sharing content created by others says about you — and why it can move your career forward.

1. You know your industry inside and out.

When you share an abundance of interesting information, people begin to realize you know your stuff. Not only do you know what’s going on, but you understand what’s valuable to people in your industry and what they want to read, which is just as important.

Even if you don’t consider yourself highly knowledgeable on a certain topic — if, for example, you’re looking to change careers and are using your online presence to pivot — you’ll become knowledgeable on that topic as you sift through blogs and tweets looking for quality information to share. In other words, curating content can help you become an authority in your field and help others see you as an authority.

2. You’re innovative.

Not only do you use the latest social tools to share advice and ideas, the information you share is often about your industry’s latest trends and developments, which suggests you’re forward thinking.

Anyone can say in an interview that they like to follow tech trends, but serving your community as a content curator shows the hiring manager you’re serious about learning, brainstorming and innovating.

3. You enjoy helping others.

So many people talk about themselves on social media. You’ll stand out if you get off the soapbox and instead offer helpful, valuable information, giving props to whoever created it.

This is helpful not only to the minions who read your tweets, but also to the industry leaders who wrote the blog post, tweets or updates to begin with, since you’re helping spread their content and ideas. Those thought leaders will likely appreciate your efforts and might even look to connect further with you, which could lead to more opportunities.

See why being generous online is one of the best things you can do for yourself?

4. You’re familiar with the big (and little) players in your field.

Knowing who the thought-leaders are in your field and where they hang out is just as important — if not more — than being in-the-know about innovative developments. Why? Because those people likely are part of those developing trends, or at least talking about them. In many ways, they are the trends.

In their book The Startup of You, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha wrote, “If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for people.” Knowing who’s doing what in your industry can go a long way toward helping you take the next step in your career. Curating content is a solid way to keep up with what everyone’s doing.

5. In some cases, you have access to those industry players.

Know what every employer wants more than an awesome, skilled employee? An awesome, skilled employee who knows people. Every one of your connections means a connection for your company.

If you don’t know any of the major players in your industry now, look to create those connections through sharing other people’s content. Your generosity could lead to online conversations with those people as they leave comments on your blog posts or reply to you through Twitter. Really want to get on their radar? Try an email introduction after you’ve mentioned that contact on your blog or Twitter, with the hope that they’ll recognize your name.

If you’re keen to give this a go, you’re probably wondering: What’s the best way to find quality information to share with your growing online community?

Try using an RSS tool like Feedly, organizing tweeps who share valuable information into Twitter lists, and streamlining the sharing process with apps like Hootsuite, Buffer and Twitterfeed. Before you know it, you’ll be the one who people in your industry turn to for all the best information, which makes you that much more marketable.

Have something to add to this story?

Quelle: http://mashable.com/2013/11/23/sharing-other-peoples-content/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link