Decoding The Shift
‘New media’ is the means of communicating using digital technologies like the internet whilst ‘Old media’ is usually considered as television, radio, print media, journals, etc. In the past decade, social media has gone from being just an entertainment medium to an integral part of people's daily lives. It's impact has been huge and has completely changed the world. The adoption of these technologies is rapidly changing and influencing the different aspects of our lives like how we find friends and partners, how we access information from the news, and how we organize to demand social or political change. Who are the social media users? When did the era of social media start and what are the biggest social media sites today? We are here to answer these and other key questions to understand the use of social media around the world. Research shows that happiness and income are related but we also know that people often overestimate the impact of income on happiness. Social relations might be the missing element. In rich countries where people are satisfied by the minimum living standards, people may struggle to become happier because they end up targeting material rather than social goals. Let us hav a look at how the evolution of social media has influenced the happiness index and labour productivity around the world.
The Evolution of New Media
The evolution of social media started with MySpace which also became the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users. MySpace achieved this milestone around 2004 and it turned out to be the beginning of social media as we know it. Within a few years down the line, Facebook became the largest social media platform in the world with 2.4 billion users. Other popular social media platforms like WhatsApp and Youtube also have more than a billion users each. Data shows that out of the approximate 7.7 billion people in the world, at least 3.5 billion are online which means that social media platforms are used by one-in-three people in the world, and more than two-thirds of all internet users. This is huge. Later came another social media platform called TikTok. It was launched in September 2016 and reached half a billion users by mid-2018. To put it in simple terms, TikTok got about 20 million new users per month on an average over this period of time. The evolution of new media has come across as both a boon and a bane. The usage of social media has now reached a point where it is embedded within the daily lives of people and it goes without saying that the world cannot function without it anymore.
The Growth of New Media
The growth of social media has also led to the obsolescence of the once-dominant platforms. For example, MySpace, Hi5 and Friendster were oncevery close competitors of Facebook, yet they had lost their market shares by 2012. It was quite astounding considering that in 2006, MySpace temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US. In the past decade, there have been significant changes in most of the social media platforms that survived in relation to what they offer the users. For example, earlier, Twitter didn’t allow its users to upload videos or images but this feature was enabled since 2011 and today more than 50% of the content viewed on Twitter includes videos and images. Facebook has become the most popular social media platform today with 2.4 billion users followed by YouTube, Instagram and WeChat, each with more than a billion users. Tumblr and TikTok come next, each with over half a billion users. The World Value Suvrvey had once asked respondents questions about their lives, including whether they were part of social groups and how often they spent time with friends, and also if they felt content with their lives. Data showed that a we there is indeed a raw correlation between happiness and social relations across different societies.
The Impact of New Media
The impact of social media has been huge. The average numbers mask a great deal of heterogeneity across platforms. Some of the new media platforms are much more popular than others among specific population groups. In general, young people are more likely to use social media than older people. But there are some platforms that are much more popular among younger people. For example, for Snapchat and Instagram the ‘age gradient’ is very steep. Data shows that the popularity of both these platforms decrease as the age increases as majority of people under 25 years use Snapchat (73%), while only 3% of people over 65 years use it. Though it is hard to know how much of this age gradient is the result of a 'cohort effect' since these platforms are relatively new. In simpler words, it is still not clear whether today’s young population will continue using Snapchat and Instagram as they become older. The age gradient would narrow if they do. Similarly, gender differences are very large for some platforms. The percentage of women who use Pinterest is more than twice as high as the percentage of men who use this platform whilst for Reddit it is the other way around. The percentage of men is almost twice as high as comapred to women. Young people tend to use social media more frequently.
Analysis
The first takeaway is that the association between well-being and social media is a complex thing and also reciprocal, which means that simple correlations can be misleading. A careful analysis of survey data reveals that, there is definitely a correlation between social media and well-being but the relationship works both ways. Data reveals that sometimes higher use of social media leads to a decrease in life satisfaction and decreasing life satisfaction also means an increase in social media usage. The second takeaway is that the effect of social media on well-being is likely small for an average person. There is a lot to be learned about how to the digital platforms can be used in better ways. There is also an important discussion to be had about the opportunity costs of spending large fractions of time online. For this, one needs to look beyond the newspaper headlines and conduct research with more granular data to unveil the diverse usage patterns. It is important to understand the different impacts that certain types of content have on specific population groups. Lastly, the new policies should focus much more about strategies and ways to promote positive content and healthy interactions. Data shows that in rich countries, since access to the internet is nearly universal, majority of the young adults use it hence there should be discussions on how much 'screen-time' these young adults spend per day and what are it's impacts.