“Facebook is the geriatric hospital,” says the British newspaper The Economist. “It's the cemetery: you go in to see who has died,” says Felipe Romero, partner of the consulting firm The Cocktail. Its current mission is equivalent to that of the yellow pages at the end of the 20th century: to prove that you exist or that you have once existed. It was the first social network, and it brought together boomers, There were laughter and tears, fights and reconciliations. That was commitment, but no one knew: marketing jargon had not yet contaminated everything.
Around 2012, leaving Facebook became the ethical and moral posture of millennials who stopped logging in but did not delete their accounts. So there are still 3,049 million people, between active users and souls in pain. In Spain, we exceed 21.5 million. “The time of use is low, but we are still there,” says Romero. In 2023, Facebook's profits soared by 69%, thanks, among other things, to the millions of euros invested by political parties and their candidates. In the “geriatric home”, from time to time it gets messy. No one beats Facebook in emotional manipulation to create community against a common enemy. That is why it continues to be the field where the most delusional conspiracies spread.
Already entering the second decade of the century, a narcissistic and dramatic generation, called millennials and born between 1981 and 1996, stood in front of the front camera of the mobile phone and created the selfie, the cute and an entire anthropological and aesthetic category: the instagrammable. . Instagram was filled with self-portraits, first tacky and poorly lit, and then quasi-professional. Facial recognition algorithms had a field day while an entire generation pouted and tested how much filter there was. The marketing experts who then sublimated this generation now say that it is “the most stereotyped and vilified” on the internet. “People between the ages of 25 and 38 are experiencing the Instagram boom to the fullest, and many have enormous resistance to changing platforms even when they consume content bounced from TikTok on Instagram,” reflects Álvaro L. Pajares, content creator and author of Memeceno (La Caja Books, 2023).
Álvaro Pajares opened a TikTok account for his grandmother because it seemed like the easiest and most intuitive ecosystem for older people. The lady is delighted. “Many people over 50 are very happy there,” she says. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that 56% of American adults between 18 and 34 years old have a TikTok account, but only half have ever published a video. A behavior identical to that of users between 35 and 49 years old on that social network. On TikTok, most of us are voyeurs of what creates a very professionalized minority. For Pew Research Center, the definitive proof of how unimportant it is to socialize there is that 70% of users do not fill out the field in their biography, and have never received a like.
Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) is the most sophisticated in the use of their networks and has no need to socialize, at least not like their predecessors did. They publish and they don't care what their followers think. They are the true digital natives and navigate the web with their own rules. A 2023 Gallup poll assures that the late generation Z remains on-line about five hours a day, but jumping between seven different platforms. They are the majority on Instagram (Gallup estimates that in 2027 80% of Zetas will be there, compared to 79.1% who will have an account on TikTok), but they spend more time on the Chinese platform. Hit by confinement at the age of taking over the world, the Zetas saw how their school schedule and their leisure time were contaminated on the screens. That's why they are passionate about routines. The longer and more verbose, the better: skincare of 1,000 steps, rules for taking a eucalyptus bath, hierarchies for organizing the closet by range of whites. Order, control and an Anglo-Saxon word for everything: aesthetic.
Curiously, a generation that does not seem to cultivate anarchy is iconoclastic with its networks: it spends two-thirds of the day on TikTok but goes to Instagram to send direct messages; He changes Google for TikTok for searches, and has a good time on X, formerly Twitter. The Zetas have turned X into a huge streaming forum to comment on Operation Triumph or Temptation Island. According to the Gallup survey, while other generations scared off Elon Musk (almost 10% dropped out), the drop among Zennials was only 2%. For them, Twitter is not a space for confrontation. Another surprise: AndrewMcCaskill, Career Expert at LinkedIn, a dull adult network if ever there was one, told The Cut that 41% of its content between 2021 and 2023 had been created by the Zetas.
The latest demographic pirouette heralds the advent of the Alpha generation, called mini-millennials in some quarters. They are less than 14 years old and 2.8 million are born every week in the world. The British newspaper The Times outlines their profile: “They know how to edit a video but not how to tie their shoelaces. They eat sushi and think that spam is a type of email, they will get their driving license in an electric car and they will never have seen a landline.” I add: they lock themselves in the bathroom with their parents' phone and TikTok account, and they take retinol before they are 12 years old… It will be the largest generation in history. Maybe they are no longer entertained by social media. A fast-paced, intelligent and artificial world awaits you.
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