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Spending Time On Social Media Is Both Good And Bad

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Spending Time On Social Media Is Both Good And Bad

Although I am clearly a Baby Boomer, I spend enormous amount of time on social media.

After spending multiple hours a week watching Facebook’s Reels and YouTube clips, I wondered if somebody had measured how much time a person spends on a social media app.

I recently came across several articles with data analysis on these websites and found out I am not alone in spending too much time on social media.

According to the compilation of data acquired by Similarweb, the following as been analyzed by DesignRush as reported by GlobalThinkers:

The average American spends 68 minutes per day on the top five social media platforms, equaling almost 5% of their life, or 3.81 years.

YouTube has the highest average visit duration of 20 minutes and 23 seconds; YouTube Kids is even higher, with children who visit for just one hour a day spending 15 days a year watching videos. WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram comprise the top five platforms with the longest time on-site.

Assuming a user accesses the top five social media platforms daily for a combined average visit duration of over 68 minutes, the user would spend approximately 4.77% of a lifetime on social media, or over 3 years 9 months over an 80-year lifespan.

That’s 413 hours, or over 17 days per year, scrolling just the top five social media sites.

When you discount eight hours of sleep, that figure rises to five years and eight months.

Reviews.Org did an even more thorough review of these social media trends.

This report adds even more color and notes that Americans reported spending an average of two hours or more on only four platforms:

  • TikTok: 2 hours, 44 minutes
  • Tumblr: 2 hours, 41 minutes
  • YouTube: 2 hours, 35 minutes
  • Facebook: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Reviews.org goes further on these trends. Here are some of the report’s most interesting findings:

The average American spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media per day.

TikTok users spend time on the app more than the average social media user, at 2 hours and 43 minutes.

  • With TikTok being the most time-consuming app for social media users, Tumblr and YouTube follow behind at just a little over 2.5 hours a day
  • When asked which social media app Americans use the most, YouTube ranked #1, followed by Facebook (2), Instagram (3), Pinterest (4), and TikTok (5)
  • Gen X uses Facebook more than any other age group.
  • YouTube is the most popular social app for Millennials and Gen Z.
  • TikTok, Snapchat, and X/Twitter are most popular among Gen Z

Some interesting findings on the impact of social media include:

  • 50% say excessive social media use has had negative effects on mental health and well-being
  • 35% often find themselves comparing their lives and achievements to what others post on social media
  • 24% experience FOMO (fear of missing out) and/or anxiety when they are not able to access or use social media
  • 23% feel pressure to curate a certain image or persona on social media.

After perusing these two articles, I realize I am probably an anomaly as I exceed typical social media usage in my demographic. In my defense, covering social media and staying up with tech trends is part of my job.

And it does appear that those using social media the most are millennials and Gen X.

The impact of social media call-outs from Reviews.org is important, especially regarding social media’s impact on mental health.

I admit that when I read some things, especially on X, I often have extremely adverse reactions to what I am seeing, and at that point, there are emotional impacts on my mental health.

The role social media plays in our lives is only increasing, and as these reports suggest, it has become a central communication, learning, informational and entertainment hub of our worlds.

To avoid getting swept away by social media, I need to have more restraint in how much time I use social media in general.

However, this one big question about how social media impacts mental health is a big issue that social scientists, educators, legislators, parents and individuals must take seriously.

I understand that you can’t legislate human nature, but understanding how social media impacts our time and mental health needs to become more important to leaders, parents, teachers, etc. Without more self-discipline and social media companies doing more to place more significant positive restraints on their applications, I believe social media will become even more dominant and influential in every part of our lives, and many will spend/waste even more time on social media in the future.

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Individual + Team Stats: Hornets vs. Timberwolves

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CHARLOTTE HORNETS MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES You can follow us for future coverage by liking us on Facebook & following us on X: Facebook – All Hornets X – …

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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem

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What went wrong with 'the Metaverse'? An insider's postmortem


It’s now two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, ushering in a brief but blazing enthusiasm over “the Metaverse”, a concept from science fiction that suddenly seemed to be the next inevitable leap in technology. For most people in tech, however, the term has since lost its luster, seemingly supplanted by any product with “artificial intelligence” attached to its description. 

But the true story of the Metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complicated and interesting than simply being the short life cycle of a buzzword — it also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.  

Consider:

The forgotten novel

Ironically, many tech reporters discounted or even ignored the profound influence of Snow Crash on actual working technologists. The founders of Roblox and Epic (creator of Fortnite) among many other developers were directly inspired by the novel. Despite that, Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk tale has often been depicted as if it were an obscure dystopian tome which merely coined the term. As opposed to what it actually did: describe the concept with a biblical specificity that thousands of developers have referenced in their virtual world projects — many of which have already become extremely popular.

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Snow Crash.

You can see this lack of clarity in many of the mass tech headlines attempting to describe the Metaverse in the wake of Facebook’s name change: 

In a widely shared “obituary” to the Metaverse, Business Insider’s Ed Zitron even compounded the confusion still further by inexplicably misattributing the concept to TRON, the original Disney movie from the 80s.

Had the media referenced Snow Crash far more accurately when the buzz began, they’d come away with a much better understanding of why so many technologists are excited by the Metaverse concept — and realize its early incarnation is already gaining strong user traction.  

Because in the book, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that’s simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. In other words, it’s more or less like Roblox and Fortnite — platforms with many tens of millions of active users. 

But then again, the tech media can’t be fully blamed for following Mark Zuckerberg’s lead.

Rather than create a vision for its Metaverse iterating on already successful platforms — Roblox’s 2020 IPO filing even describes itself as the metaverse — Meta’s executive leadership cobbled together a mishmash of disparate products. Most of which, such as remotely working in VR headsets, remain far from proven. According to an internal Blind survey, a majority of Zuckerberg’s own employees say he has not adequately explained what he means by the Metaverse even to them.

Grievous of all, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth promoted a conception of the Metaverse in which the Quest headset was central. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence — raised by senior Microsoft researcher danah boyd at the time of the company acquiring Oculus in 2014 — that females have a high propensity to get nauseous using VR.

Meta Quest 3 comes out on October 10 for $500.
Meta Quest 3.

Contacted in late 2022 while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, danah told me no one at Oculus or Meta followed up with her about the research questions she raised. Over the years, I have asked several senior Meta staffers (past and present) about this and have yet to receive an adequate reply. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset has an estimated install base of only about 20 million units, significantly smaller than the customer count of leading video game consoles. A product that tends to make half the population puke is not exactly destined for the mass market — let alone a reliable base for building the Metaverse. 

Ironically, Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.

Duct-taped to yet another buzzword

Further sealing the Metaverse hype wave’s fate, it crested around the same time that Web3 and crypto were still enjoying their own euphoria period. This inevitably spawned the “cryptoverse” with platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. When the crypto crash came, it was easy to assume the Metaverse was also part of that fall.

But the cryptoverse platforms failed in the same way that other crypto schemes have gone awry: By offering a virtual world as a speculative opportunity, it primarily attracted crypto speculators, not virtual world enthusiasts. By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me

“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”

All this occurred as the rise of generative AI birthed another, shinier buzzword — one that people not well-versed in immersive virtual worlds could better understand.

But as “the Metaverse” receded as a hype totem, a hilarious thing happened: Actual metaverse platforms continued growing. Roblox now counts over 300 million monthly active users, making its population nearly the size of the entire United States; Fortnite had its best usage day in 6 years. Meta continues plodding along but seems to finally be learning from its mistakes — for instance, launching a mobile version of its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.  

Roblox leads the rise of user-generated content.
Roblox.

Into this mix, a new wave of metaverse platforms is preparing to launch, refreshingly led by seasoned, successful game developers: Raph Koster with Playable Worlds, Jenova Chen with his early, successful forays into metaverse experiences, and Everywhere, a metaverse platform lead developed by a veteran of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

At some point, everyone in tech who co-signed the “death” of the Metaverse may notice this sustained growth. By then however, the term may no longer require much usage, just as the term “information superhighway” fell away as broadband Internet went mainstream.  

Wagner James Au is author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For 

GamesBeat’s creed when covering the game industry is “where passion meets business.” What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you — not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.

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Social media blocks are “a suppression of an essential avenue for transparency”

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In this photo illustration the word censored is seen displayed on a smartphone with the logos of social networks Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube in the background.

Once praised as the defining feature of the internet, the ability to connect with physically distant people is something that governments have recently been seemingly intent on restricting. Authorities have been increasingly pulling the plug, putting over 4 billion people in the shadows in the first half of 2023 alone

Social media platforms are often the first means of communication to be restricted. Surfshark, one of the most popular VPN services, counted at least 50 countries guilty of having curbed these websites and apps during periods of political turmoil such as protests, elections, or military activity.

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