How does every generation view social media?

By Devon Lee

Why should we care about social media?

SixDegrees.com was founded by American businessman Andrew Weinreich in 1997. This website is widely regarded as the first social media platform. Like many early versions of social media it only had a few features: centered around the “social-circles network model”, the website allowed users to form relationships with other users and send messages to one another. 

At its peak sixdegrees.com had 3.5 million active users and 100 employees. Since then, social media has changed dramatically. Today, Facebook is the most popular social media platform with over 3 billion active monthly users. 

According to DataReportal, approximately 239 million Americans are on social media. That’s about 7 in 10 people. Across generations, social media use is ubiquitous (Gen Z: 62.5 million, Millennials: 69.2 million, Gen X: 50.6 million, and Baby Boomers: 35.5 million). 

Nearly all data and research points to social media as a source of mental health problems. Rates of depression, anxiety, child suicide rates, and loneliness have steadily increased in the last 15 years. At the same time, according to Pew Research 64% of Americans view social media as negatively affecting the way things are going in the country. 

How, then, do people actually view social media? To answer this question, I interviewed one member from each generation (Gen Alpha, Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers) on their views on social media and their consumption habits. Here is what I found: 

Source Background

Gen Alpha: Juan Zarate Diaz, age 11, 6th grader at Foshay Learning Center

Gen Z: Sam Koog, age 21, fourth year applied data science and international relations undergraduate student at the University of Southern California

Millennial: Mariam Molani, age 34, pathologist at Sherman Oaks Hospital

Gen X: Gabe Kahn, age 55, Professor of Professional Practice of Journalism at the University of Southern California

Baby Boomer: Jabeen Fatima, age 61, physician at Molani Medical Group

*Disclaimer: Mariam Molani is the daughter of Jabeen Fatima

Consumption Habits

Juan Zarate Diaz — uses social media about 1.5 hours per day. Due to restrictions from his parents, Zarate Diaz is only allowed an hour of screen time Monday-Thursday with mostly free reign Friday-Sunday. His primary platform is YouTube which includes YouTube shorts. Additionally he uses discord to communicate with friends. 

Sam Koog — uses social media about 2 hours per day. Koog primarily engages with Instagram and YouTube. 

Mariam Molani — uses social media about 1.5 hours per day. Molani primarily uses Instagram and Tiktok. She spends about half of her time on social media creating content. 

Gabe Kahn — uses social media about 20 minutes per day. Kahn primarily uses BlueSky.

Jabeen Fatima — uses social media about 1 hour per day. Fatima uses Instagram and Facebook. 

Unrealistic Images

A consensus among interviewees: social media creates a false perception of reality. Koog says that seeing people posting exciting and memorable moments from their lives had a negative effect on his life to the point where he deleted Instagram momentarily. 

“It gave me unrealistic expectations about what life should be like,” he said. “Social media today, what it tries to do is show you this model of what life should look like, this almost unrealistic expectation, where life is always good and I feel like it’s not really a true kind of capture of what life really is.”

Molani says she carefully curates the kind of content she consumes. In order to avoid content that is addicting or that would cause her to compare herself to others, Molani prioritizes educational or inspiring content. As a result, she says that her experience with social media has been 70% good and 30% bad. For her, that negative aspect is almost inescapable. 

“You start seeing things that maybe aren’t real, like standards of beauty that are not real, standards of wealth that are not really attainable, standards of you know, just different things like that, standards of success that are not necessarily attainable,” she said. 

Fatima used to use Facebook until recently. She says that the kinds of content that people post, while not inherently malicious, create unnecessary social pressures that she finds toxic and purposeless to consume. 

“Everybody’s just posting whatever things which put pressure on other people,” she said. “I think that has a negative impact on a lot of people, because then you feel pressured like other people are doing things which I may not be able to do.”

Social media can also heavily influence our political views. Kahn says that the economic models of social media, which incentivize hyper specific news that feeds our confirmation bias has led to a more polarized view of the world.

“Everyone now is entitled to their own facts,” he said. “You can get your ‘facts’ that fit with your world view from any number of places, and they could be radically different than mine.”

Addiction

A concern amongst all interviewees was the addictive nature of social media. Medical News Today defines social media addiction as “When a person feels an extreme compulsion to log in or use social media. They may also feel an overwhelming concern about social media and devote a large amount of time to it.” 

While not scientifically classified as a substance use disorder, social media use is high amongst all demographics. The average American spends 2 hours and 25 minutes a day on social media. According to the Harris Poll, 60% of Gen Z uses social media more than 4 hours a day. 

Koog believes that amongst members of Gen Z, a movement to detox from social media is occurring but more broadly, high usage is still accepted as cultural norm. 

“I feel like people are so drawn into social media, they’ve accepted it as a cultural norm, that it’s really been that people can’t live without it,” he said. “Social media is almost a cornerstone of our everyday lives, like it’s almost built into our vocabulary.”

Molani says that even for content that she finds to be enriching, it can still be addicting and time consuming. 

“There is this addictive component to it, and I don’t like feeling, even for a short amount of time, that something is controlling me,” she said. ““Even if I’m getting educational content from it, even if I’m getting some kind of inspiration from my life or my home from it, it’s time consuming, so it is taking up a portion of my life that could otherwise be spent on my family, on my friends, or on my career.”

Kahn says that compared to people in his age group, he is much more skeptical. As an expert in the economic models of the news industry professor Kahn says that social media is similar to junk food: it’s accessible but terrible for your health.

“You can walk into a store and you see some brightly colored, fairly cheap junk food sitting there, right on the first shelf,” he said. “You turn around and you go to a gas station, and it’s there again. You go to the drug store, it’s there again. It’s everywhere, and it’s the first thing you can put down. You just start eating that stuff all day long. There’s going to be consequences for you.”

“You just start eating that stuff all day long, there’s going to be consequences for you,” he said. 

Zarate Diaz says YouTube shorts can be addicting. In recent years, “brain rot” has emerged as a new term to describe internet content that is low quality and damaging to one’s mental acuity. Much of short form content like Instagram Reels, Tiktok and YouTube shorts are categorized as hotbeds of this kind of content. Zarate Diaz says he was once addicted to this content but was educated by family members to avoid it. Now, he self regulates his consumption. 

“Skibidi toilet shenanigans or something like, bro, I’m not trying to watch that. And if you watch it a lot, you’re gonna get addicted to it, and you’re gonna watch it every day,” he said. “So once I see a cringe video, I’m out. I’m just out.”

Affects to in person socialization

Social media usage has not only changed the way that we conceptualize the digital world but also how we socialize in real life. Corwin says that people are socializing less and using their phones more often for communication. 

Fatima says that people in younger generations are less socially intelligent than older generations because newer generations simply lack experience. 

“The social skills are not strong,” she said. “When you are socially more interactive and you’re hanging out with your friends, family, in school and outside the school, you learn from each other. Those things have gone down because people are literally confined to themselves.”

While it is difficult to measure the ways social media has affected or damaged in-person interactions there are a few ways to quantify the effects. 

The average person’s attention span has decreased over the past two decades. The infamous adage that the average Gen Z has the attention span of less than a goldfish comes from a 2015 report from Microsoft Canada that produced data based on survey results of the Canadian adults (Gen Z was 2-17 at the time). University of California, Irvine psychologist and researcher Gloria Mark has found that the average attention span on screens is down by one minute and forty three seconds since 2004 to just forty seven seconds. 

People are interacting in-person less. According to the American Time Use Survey, “we are spending 30% less time doing face-to-face socializing than we did just 20 years ago.” 

In addition to decreased attention span and less time in-person, the quality of in-person relationships is also declining in certain ways. A Forbes survey reported that 59% of people say forming relationships with others is harder after the pandemic. 

Koog says that many in-person relationships cannot exist without a social media component which can lead to a feeling of closeness but not real intimacy.

“At the end of the day, it’s like, when you eat, let’s say a lot of junk food,” he said. “Sure it’s food, sure it’s calories, but it’s never gonna give you that proper nourishment. People don’t necessarily feel that sense of companionship that they would from having real, in person, friends and experiences.”

Molani says that many folks in her age group have started to rely on social media as their only source of in person social interaction due to the obligations of work and starting a family. 

“It’s an effort like there never was before,” she said. “I know that now, as a mom and as a working person. I think there’s this group that no longer can be social in person… they feel like that is enough, like that’s all they can manage, and that checks a social box for them, and they don’t really get out anymore.”

Kahn says that social media’s algorithms exacerbate ideological differences based on algorithms and watch times. In his experience, social media often fed him information in which people were mad at something or he was mad at the content.

“Those types of platforms are designed to deliver fragmentation and destroy social cohesion.It’s a feature, not a bug.”

Positive uses of social media

Despite the overwhelming sentiment that social media is a net-negative to our mental and physical health both from the interviewees, there are still some benefits to be taken from the new technology. Of course, with the ability to connect online to anyone in the world, our ability to access different communities is unlike ever before. 

Corwin says that this component of social media has helped minorities in cases where they are isolated from a particular group. 

“What if you’re at a predominantly white school and there’s a very few black students in your social circle, you could actually find community online, in an online space that could be, like, very empowering to you.”

For Zarate Diaz, the social media function of video games like Roblox and Fortnite have been useful in allowing him to interact with his friends when he otherwise would only be able to see them in school.

Koog, who interned at a marketing company, says that the social media’s ability to expand the economy is a potential for good. 

“It has done so much to revolutionize business marketing and many different industries.”

Fatima says small doses of social media like silly comedy videos, cooking recipes, and health and wellness content are helpful in lightening her mood.

For Molani, social media can be more than just consuming content. It has allowed her to connect and catch up with friends and colleagues she otherwise wouldn’t have been in contact with. And as a licensed physician Molani finds joy in using social media as an outlet for her creative side and passion for teaching. 

“Social media provides me a space where I can be a teacher for people and share information, and nobody can tell me what I can teach or not teach,” she said. “Here I have complete creative and educational liberty to share the information that I think is important to somebody.”

The future of social media

Give the breadth of perspectives on social media across all ages, how then, can we reconcile the future of social media. Underscoring this exploration into the effects of social media is the idea of change. In just a few decades, social media has changed seemingly every aspect of our social landscape: how we connect, communicate, form relationships, think, act, feel, and interact with the world. Looking forward, it seems as if there are an endless number of challenges that we will face with social media, the effects of which we likely do not have the full grasp of. 

One silver lining of social media usage is that according to some, it appears to be going down. Kahn says that in his age group, many are turning away from social media.

“We have a distant memory of what that simpler time was like when there were actually things like moments of boredom, which has sort of been erased from our experience,” he said. “Boredom is the font of creativity. In my very narrow experience of people my age and stuff I got in my very unrepresentative cohort of old folks, I see the use of it starting to drop.”

If there was any demographic that will face the consequences of social media it is the newer generations. Current legislative advocacy is working to curb the access of social media to younger audiences given the abundance of scientific evidence illustrating the negative affects of social media but at the moment bureaucracy and the interests of big tech seem to stand in the way.  

“There’s legislation right now being talked about that is supposed to protect kids from social media, but a lot of the advocacy groups are saying it’s actually not the case at all, and it’s a bad piece of legislation that won’t actually protect anyone,” Kuhn said. “What stops people from doing anything about it is they’re just this feeling from the tech industry, that they’re ubiquitous, and you can’t really fight back.”

For Molani and her two year old daughter Maya Noor Bartels-Molani, the answer is clear: social media has no place for young children.