Technology, Inequality, and Society

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 sug...

The “ Teens, social media and technology 2022 ” survey conducted by Pew Research in the USA finds that teens (13-17 years) that ‘ever’ use Twitter has gone down from 33% in 2014-15 to 23% 2022. The term “ever use” means they “hardly use at all” in the context of the survey. Percentage of teens that “constantly use” Twitter would be much much lower, in single digit I would guess. We can extrapolate the guesstimate from their earlier report. In 2019 they reported that only 10% of the adult Twitter users are the “most active” (read it here ).  If we are to be observer similar proportion, total Teens that are most active on Twitter is 2.3%. There are several interesting observations regarding other social media platforms, which I will cover on other posts. I focus on Twitter to focus on specific questions that immediately came into my mind while reading the statistics. In no particular order: Is Twitter use driven by adults (non-teens) whose first experience with social media is throug...