The American press has been warning about this for several months now. Social networks, starting with X, Facebook and even Instagram, are facing an existential threat that can seriously put their future at risk. It is the desertion of millennialsthe population group that contributed most to promoting them, mainly responsible for that golden age of universal connectivity that occurred between 2008 and 2015.
By millennials In the United States, it is understood as those who were born between 1981 and 1996 and are currently between 27 and 42 years old. This is a very large demographic group, 72.4 million Americans (around 22% of the total) and nearly 1.8 billion Earthlings. This group, according to Lauren Goode anticipated in the magazine Wireda widespread feeling of orphanhood is emerging on-line. The networks they frequented have long ceased to be what they were and they cannot find, for the moment, substitutes with which to satisfy the thirst for digital interaction that they developed in childhood and adolescence.
We are talking about the generation that looked at MySpace in 2003 after having gone through Friendster, that almost exclusively integrated that 5% of pioneers who already had a Facebook account in 2005, that opted for Twitter in 2008, when it was little more than the toy that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore used to display their marital intimacy. The millennialsIn short, they have been sharing photos for more than 20 years, collecting friends, spreading their moods, writing haikus that they often transform into throwing weapons, making scroll infinite and letting your thoughts flow feeds.
Now, as Jason Parham explains, also in Wired, suffer “the collective erosion of their favorite platforms” like someone getting used to the loss of an old love. In Elon Musk’s On Instagram they only find “invasive and influencers obsessed with selling them facial creams.” Facebook seems to them an increasingly depressing and tiring corner of nostalgia. And they feel that younger people have usurped YouTube to turn it into a new environment that they no longer understand.
The exodus of the old rockers
Hence, they feel that they “no longer have anywhere to go” and that they are beginning to cancel their accounts or leave them fallow. L’Oreal Thompson Payton states in Yahoo Finance that deserting the networks is beginning to become for them “a question of survival and mental health.” Last July, when Elon Musk announced that was reducing the dose of digital stimuli, they reacted sarcastically: “Thank you Twitter, for curing me of an absurd addiction.” “The last obstacle that prevented me from realizing my goals in life has just disappeared.”
For Katie Notopoulos, of Business Insider, the time has come to sing a requiem for “the networks that were.” And nothing happens. The idea that this generation that bridged the analogue and digital worlds, the last one to grow up in a world without the Internet, was going to retire devoting a quarter of its leisure time to social networks was a naive pretension. Everything has an end. And it’s okay, so be it. If they end up migrating to new networks like Spill, Mastodon, Bluesky either Threads They will be betraying themselves and the Internet they believed in.
According to another of the technology experts Business Insider, Subham Agarwal, what they should do is turn the page. Networks, as you knew them, have ceased to exist. “They were platforms for direct interconnection between human beings,” explains Agarwal, “and today they are mediocre entertainment channels.” They are victims of deliberate deterioration of the technological leisure offer that Meta, Google or Amazon are promoting. Abandoning them to their fate, no matter how painful it may be, is a sign of sanity and good sense.
I only have Instagram left
Is this gradual desertion of the pioneers an exclusively North American phenomenon or is it also occurring in Spain? Mar Canet, a 45-year-old cultural entrepreneur, does consider that her generation, the boomers late bloomers, they have had enough of “wasting time” on networks that no longer provide them with “anything worthwhile.” She has renounced Twitter and Facebook, “except for work reasons,” and she has not looked at Instagram for several months, the corner where she shared, very occasionally, “travel or sports photos.” The networks served to create a feeling of false proximity with the friends that she recovered through them, but today she prefers to cultivate that sporadic relationship through WhatsApp.
Juliana P., a 41-year-old designer, got off Twitter fed up with “the tension, the sound and the fury” of a platform that wanted to be an agora and ended up transformed into a cage of crickets. She didn’t even need Elon Musk to transform her into tweets gave me something worthwhile. It is too much effort and too much time wasted to accumulate very little satisfaction.” She had Facebook, she had Snapchat and she had Instagram and she believes that she no longer even keeps the access codes: “Why do I want them?”
Héctor Acosta, a 29-year-old law graduate, is one of those who thanks “the brutal deterioration of the large networks” for helping him overcome one of his oldest addictions: “I would hardly have given up Facebook or Twitter five years ago.” or ten years, because they excited me, I didn’t understand life without them.” For those of now, “a couple of gigantic teleshops in which increasingly anxious salespeople harass you from the moment you look in the door so that you buy things that you neither want nor need”, it is finding it very easy to give up.
Olga Jiménez, 33 years old, an administrator, decided months ago to drastically restrict the time she dedicated to her digital interactions. Within the framework of this new policy of forced austerity, she has chosen to preserve “TikTok and Instagram.” The first, because he finds it “fresh and fun,” and the second, because he has built in it, “a corner that I feel is very much mine, like a visual chronicle of the last years of my life. “I would feel very bad if it were simply lost.”
For Sergi Martos, 32 years old, it is precisely that, “the emotional investment on which it is so difficult to turn your back definitively”, the only reason that will prevent him from “divorce” from the networks once and for all: “It has been a long time since I consider it a toxic routine that wastes a lot of time and gives me very little, less and less, but how can I give up thousands of contacts accumulated over the years or the possibility of interacting, from time to time, with people I know? What do I admire, like writers, thinkers or film directors?” Martos is also concerned “that the providers of this type of service are not making a sincere effort to adapt to the new data protection policies that are being implemented in Spain and the European Union.”
These are five examples picked at random, but they illustrate, without a doubt, that the supposed decline of the networks and the desire to distance oneself from them or dedicate less and less time to them is already part of the conversations of the millennials.
A youth sport
Of course, beyond the story, there is the data. Santiago Giménez, professor at OBS Business School, establishes in his report Social networks, current state and trends 2023 that the number of social media users “continues with an upward trend” that was accentuated during the pandemic and shows no signs of beginning to subside. In the last year, according to data from the Hootsuite agency cited by Giménez, it has grown by 3% to reach 4.76 billion users, 59.4% of the world’s population.
In the United States, the place where Wired, Business Insider either the C.B.S. They assure that the winter of discontent has arrived that will leave the networks empty, 72% of adults makes use of them today. Are we not predicting the death of a patient who enjoys very good health? Judging by the Hootsuite report, if networks grow it is, above all, for two main reasons. On the one hand, digitalization is advancing at a forced pace in places that until not long ago remained relatively untouched by it, such as much of Africa and areas of Asia, Oceania and Latin America. On the other hand, generational change has accelerated. New users are joining this form of interaction and entertainment at increasingly younger ages. In some cases, even before leaving puberty behind.
In other words, we are looking at an increasingly globalized and rejuvenated social media ecosystem. Generation Z (born between the mid-nineties and the early years of the 21st century) has already displaced the millennials in the role of main drivers of extreme connectivity. They cannot conceive life without the Internet, they have grown up with a high degree of exposure to networks and they do not at all share the almost fetishistic fascination of their parents and older siblings for the handful of pioneering platforms that made them discover a new world.
They already deserted Facebook, they already got bored of Twitter and they are starting to get bored of Instagram. WhatsApp is their backyard, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify, their new toys, they have not completely forgotten Twitch or even Pinterest, they have tried Telegram and your creative use of Linkedin It has surprised those responsible for the platform. The short-term success of the networks that we consider emerging today, from BeReal to Lemon8 or Letterboxd to Clubhouse, Substack or the aforementioned Threads and Mastodon, depends largely on them. Behind them, the Alfas are joining in, born from 2010 onwards and increasingly active on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram, where they have become a preferred audience for influencers every time more Youngers.
Seen from this perspective, what may be happening to the millennials is that they have been overwhelmed by the passage of time, an invading army that never retreats and takes no prisoners. Until now, they resisted the onslaught of young people entrenched in their Facebook, overwhelming them with their tweet incontinence or testing the storage capacity of Instagram. Today, the platforms they grew up with no longer meet their expectations. And they feel too old to pack up and move to Bluesky or Spill. The networks will feel the blow, but they will survive without them. It remains to be seen whether they will survive without networks.
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