In this post I continue with a quick reading of the “Teens, social media and technology 2022” survey findings. Previously I looked at Twitter, technology that teens never fell in love. In this post I am curious why so many teens broke their relationship with Facebook.
In 2014-15 Facebook dominated Snapchat and Instagram. 71% of teens in the survey said they ‘ever use’ Facebook back then. The term ‘ever use’ can be misread so I clarify it a bit. They use this term to distinguish from ‘constant use’. It suffices to read ‘ever use’ as ‘once in a while’. In 2022 this number has plummeted to 32%. Only 2% of them associate themselves with ‘constant use’. Considering the scale, this is a dramatic drop. Why did this happen?
It is easy to fall into the trap of weaving a story after the fact. There are many such contenders.
First a classic, “teens left when adults (and parents) flocked to it in huge numbers”.
Second, “teens never were into it actually despite what the big number suggests. They felt obliged to use it and when opportunity came they left it”.
Third, “privacy. To the contrary, teens do not want to share every minute of their life”.
Fourth, “they were simply bored of the same old same old”.
And there can be a long list of similar attempts at explanation. These explanations appear like a cheesy remark because of the way I have phrased them. I also could have attached a list of terms instead. Privacy, cliché, peer-pressure, social factors and disinterest are some of the terms associated with the earlier explanations. And there are lots of academic articles on them and from every discipline that is interested in explaining human behaviour.
I do not have the answers. But I have a remark. And that is why I wrote a blog post and not a journal article. There is a strong temptation from my side to critique poor attempts to explain why teenagers left Facebook in large numbers. First, characterizing offline personality traits and motivation of teenagers and then transferring it to the digital realm is not something that can be done from few small studies. Second, proving that the observed relationships between the characterization and action is not a statistical correlation is hard. It is my view that many people (academics and non-academics) have attempted to characterize teens in the simplest terms imaginable. That they are “emotionally fragile”, “easily bored”, “addicted to anything new”, “incapable of resisting peer-pressure” etc. I think there is a strong influence of “adult” bias.
If someone were to do a survey of teenagers and ask the question “Why did you leave Facebook?” and give the options: “I was losing sanity”, “I was bored”, “It was invading into my privacy”, “I switched to TikTok”, “All of my friends left, so I left”, you will infer one of the characterizations that I just presented. It is easy to fall into the trap, often unintentionally, of providing a “hindsight explanation” that fits the data. It is also easy to see such studies fall flat on its face when five years later a new survey refutes the claim.
I do believe a strong case can be made to support the claim that teenagers are the most misunderstood demographic. Time and again the generalizations fail and new "hindsight explanations" emerge to address the residual.
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