A recent study surveyed 1,004 Latvian residents aged 18 to 70. It turned out that approximately 65% of these respondents use social networks for more than two hours a day. If this continues, this large part of society will spend approximately five years of their lives on social networks. How to limit the use of social networks?
The time spent on social networks and mobile phones is generally large, even very large, but this is easily explained.
If earlier social networks were just entertainment, spending free time, then today they are a platform for building your personal, professional and business reputation, recognition, for example, as a specialist in a certain field, promoting products and services, etc.
Nowadays, social networks provide a great many functions that are necessary for private and professional needs. Moreover, social networks are even a necessity and, to a lesser extent, entertainment – at a time when everyone communicates about everything.
It is undoubtedly important to be in this environment, otherwise our competitors, other professionals, etc. will come to the fore in our place.
Of course, there is the issue of digital “noise” and information that we receive on social networks that we do not need at all. Because of this, we also lose time and the time spent on social networks increases, but this is a “side effect” of modern digital communication that we cannot regulate.
The pandemic period facilitated communication even for people who were previously rarely or not at all on social networks – it was a time that, due to its specifics, literally “forced” them to be in the digital environment, and I am convinced that after the pandemic this number has decreased only minimally.
Undoubtedly, society needs to talk about the time children spend on social networks and smart devices in general – most often on mobile phones. We can regulate and encourage this so that children devote more time to various hobbies, but not to spending time on the phone. It depends on us, adults.
It’s a different story about young people – it’s hard to change anything there, because nowadays young people use social networks to make money, build their reputation, position themselves as experts on a certain issue, etc.
This is natural, because our time has created such conditions.
What we can do is promote public understanding of thoughtful and meaningful communication on social networks, reducing this digital “noise” and the spread of unnecessary information.
In general, this is media literacy – understanding why I use one or another piece of information, analyzing how useful it is to republish it (what benefit will it bring to society and whether it will be at all), thinking about how often we create some information ourselves and how much added value it has, namely, how interesting the content is and based on facts or whether it is just emotions.
In general, social networks are like a parallel world, which is saturated with both valuable and unnecessary information,
but we can’t say more how bad it is, because this is the era we live in. The main thing is for each of us to be responsible for the information we publish and what information we share. We create social networks, not social networks create us.
Just like with artificial intelligence – it didn’t “fall” from the moon, it was created by a person. Our tasks are to use this artificial intelligence wisely and in its essence – creating meaningful information.
Photo: https://www.outboundengine.com/blog/social-media-etiquette-for-business-25-dos-donts/
