Topic: Facebook & The Creation Of An Unsocial Generation – By Steph Forster
Today’s generation is reared on self-serve check outs & relies on receiving their news from the home page of their facebook account. When I was a kid I would ask my mom if I could pick up the phone and call a friend to come over and play and she would reply “no just go knock on their door and go there in person to call on them”. Knocking on a door seems like a foreign concept in today’s society, why would you go out and play when you can just sit inside and facebook? The following is information is based upon the statistics of facebook users in the USA in 2011 that I researched from a few cited sources as seen below.
1) Facebook.com average user figures and facts:
- Average user has 130 friends on the site
- Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
- Average user spends an average 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook per month
- Average user visits the site 40 times per month
- Average user spends an 23 minutes (23:20 to be precise) on each visit
- Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- 200 million people access Facebook via a mobile device each day
- More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared each day
- Users that access Facebook on mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook compared to non-mobile users
- Facebook generates a staggering 770 billion page views per month
2) Breakdown by country: More than 70% of Facebook users come from outside the United States
Global User Population: 629,982,480
Source: facebook.com, pingdom.com, checkfacebook.com and facebook.com
3) Global User Demographics: The global breakdown of users on Facebook by gender and age
Sources: insidefacebook.com
4) Breakdown of US users (gender and age):
As the chart above illustrates, the total US Facebook population is made up of millions of people across a range of ages groups. While young adults (18-25) lead the way with a combined ~50 million users (almost double the size from a year ago), the 26-34 group is now well behind with ~29 million users. According to the data from Facebook there a combined ~28 million people over the age of 45 active on Facebook. These are impressive user numbers from an older demographic that continue to grow. It’s important to note that the 55-64 age group is almost the size of the 13-17 group, further evidence that Facebook isn’t limited to “young” people.
A visual look at the US users by age (using data from above):
Sources: facebook.com
5) Facebook.com – a top destination site for the majority of online Americans, but some states more so than others.
Source: Socialbakers
The most important takeaway from the list above is probably the degree of penetration Facebook has relative to the population of each state. Over 50% for many. What does all of this mean for our generation? How has this impacted the way we interact with each other and will anyone ever play outside again ? What role do ethics play in this virtual world and who sets the bar? Here is a short video that sheds a humorous light on the topic of facebook ethics.
Social media is a powerful tool for any business , organization and marketing in general but there is a way to conduct your self similar to how one would behave at a dinner table with others. Perhaps the solution is to create “clean book” and have a rating system for different age groups and parental controls and even time limits that are set up by parents or internet junkies who have a hard time with setting up boundaries . For me I feel social media powerful way to reach people and utilize the platform through my iphone 95% of the time. I find more and more people are contacting me for work or work related matters using facebook and I have to tell them to please send me a proper email in my work account or else it gets lost in the vortex of my inbox that is chronically spammed with a copious amount of content which makes it hard to discern a legitimate email from daily spam.
There is also those who feel they have a relationship with you because of facebook but you don’t feel that way about them. You can have people developing unhealthy attachments and it makes it difficult to communicate or lay boundaries when it’s a virtual relationship. When you read text and are in a bad mood what may be a normal friendly email can be interpreted as angry because the tone we hear in our head is negative, perhaps you were upset about being cut off in traffic before you received the inbox message so you take it completely out of context. Then there is the dilemma to delete or remove a friend or a cyber stalker…the list goes on..
My conclusion is that I feel we need to start teaching facebook /social media etiquette and ethics in public schools/insitutions so we don’t have this virtual generation entering into the workforce with a deranged perspective on ethics. I will try this out as a pilot project in the next few years and measure the results over five years and track a focus group of candidates from different age groups and develop a better understanding of what is happening to this new generation, it seems like a daunting task but I actually find this type of experiment quite easy and enjoy measuring statistics so I am personally looking forward to it and hope you found this information insightful in some way. If we are still in touch in five years check in with me to see how the experiment worked and what type of statistical data I managed to obtain and I would be happy to report .
Cited Works Include Diagrams and Statistical Research From The Following:
facebook.com, pingdom.com, insidefacebook.com, Socialbakers, facebook.com
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Tags: social media generation
