In the past decade or so, the number of social media users has risen exponentially as people seek to stay connected with friends and loved ones. Apart from posting pictures and sharing news on platforms such as Facebook, some users have become online celebrities who earn tidy sums of money from sales and other activities.
But about 4.4 billion out of the world’s 7.6 billion inhabitants are not active social media users, while statistics show that some existing users are starting to spend less time on virtual platforms. Their chief complaint is that their Facebook feed has become cluttered with a lot of material that is irrelevant, harmful or downright depressing.
Among them is Piyarat Setthasiriphaiboon, an ex-journalist in her thirties, who has stopped using Facebook and prefers to keep in contact with friends using other methods.
Now an account manager for a US media firm in Bangkok, Ms Piyarat is not in the habit of buying things online or playing games. Having decided she could stay in touch with friends and family by other means, she saw nothing else on social media platforms to attract her. She stopped using Facebook in 2013.
“The information that you can get on social media platforms such as Facebook is either useful or useless. For me, what I found was mostly useless. I can find more useful information on other platforms and search engines, so I stopped,” she told Asia Focus.
“I believe the more time you spend on it, the lonelier you get. It is a fake world where people require virtual acceptance to somehow prove that they still exist. I might be a minority here I know but I do not need such form of acceptance,” she added.
Some other people simply prefer to keep their lives private. Asia Focus spoke with a 66-year-old painter who said he never uses social media and has no desire to do so.
“I like my privacy,” he said, asking not to be named.
He does use the internet for research purposes but does not feel the need for people to “see into my life” all the time. It’s an attitude that members of the digital generation, many of whom crave social media attention and validation, might struggle to understand.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
“Facebook Fatigue” is the expression coined in North America to describe the new trend, and it is spreading in Asia, according to Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living Asean (Hill-Asean), a thinktank established in Thailand by Hakuhodo, Japan’s second largest advertising agency. More people in Japan are getting off Facebook and other platforms because they believe they are being overwhelmed with impractical information.
“They are tired of the relentless clickbait, newsfeeds, commercials, show-offs and all the negativity that comes with it,” Prompohn, Supataravanich, a strategic planning supervisor at Hill-Asean told Asia Focus.
“People have been pouring any information they found (into Facebook) to present themselves as unique individuals to other people since Facebook was started. Now they are running out of new and interesting things to show and some groups are just tired of doing it on a regular basis.”
The Hill-Asean’s sei-katsu-sha (“living person”) report in 2017 noted that those who were born starting in the 1980s see the virtual world as a place to freely build their own personal image. Many post carefully curated and well-considered photos that only show them at their best. But some are now running out of visual ideas or simply growing tired of the game.
Meanwhile, scientific studies are starting to identify the addictive qualities of social media and its tendency to make some people sad or depressed. A study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology (Vol 33) looked at individuals who made comparisons between their lives and those of others based on social media posts, and ended up feeling sad regardless of whether the comparisons were “upward” or “downward”. In real life, only upward comparisons (feeling another life is better than yours) makes people feel bad but in the virtual world, any kind of comparison is linked to depressive symptoms.
The Financial Times recently quoted health advocates as calling on Facebook to scrap its Messenger Kids app, arguing it could harm children’s mental health and development.
Ms Prompohn believes that people getting fed up and leaving the virtual world is now a clearly observable trend in North America, Europe and Japan. She expects it to spread to like a “virus” to other markets in the near future.
“Other countries that started to use social media after the developed world, such as Thailand and other developing countries, will most likely see such a trend in the coming years,” she said. “What we can say right now is that the use of social media is still growing all around the world but the overall rate of expansion is slowing down when compared to what it was in the first decade of its existence.”
According to the Digital in 2018 Global Overview by We Are Social, the world internet penetration rate is now 53%. More than 200 million people got their first mobile phone in 2017 and more than half of the handsets in use today are smart devices.
The number of new users of top social media platforms increased by almost one million a day last year. That is equivalent to 11 new users every second. More than 3 billion people are on some kind of social media platform and nine in 10 of those users access their chosen platforms via mobile devices.
Asian countries led the expansion, topped by India (31%), Indonesia (23%), China (22%) and Vietnam (20%). All are growing above the annual worldwide average.
We Are Social also notes that a larger numbers of older users are joining social media. On Facebook alone, the number of users aged 65 and above increased almost 20% in 2017. The number of teenagers rose only 5%.
“I think social media transcends age groups,” said James Chiraphatnachai, a Thai-Australian in his 20s. “My family’s got this group chat on Line that everyone, including my parents, posts in almost every day.”
Taiwanese user Wu Yusian makes a similar observation. “My relatives, parents and grandparents have started using smartphones to access Facebook. In the past, they only used their phones for calls.”
In India, a recent Wall Street Journal report noted that the number of good-morning greetings sent via WhatsApp was actually clogging the internet. Many of those greetings are sent by older people who recently started using smartphones and the internet for the first time.
Indeed, researchers at Pennsylvania State University have found that older people now use Facebook for the same reasons that college students once did: to maintain relationships and bond with likeminded individuals. For many respondents, having access to photos and videos of their grandchildren was further motivation to stay on the platform.
Thailand is still one of Facebook’s best markets with an estimated 51 million users, up 11% from 2016. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia and Vietnam also witnessed at least 20% growth in active Facebook users, and the market is approaching saturation.
But there are pockets of Asia where access to social media is still hard to come by, and this is where the big platforms hope to grow. In Bangladesh, one young woman observes Facebook’s sprawling influence as it spreads through both cities and into more remote communities.
“My dad is from a village called Khulna, with a very weak internet connection and basically no gadgets except for those ‘brick’ phones or thick old laptops which take years to load the internet,” Shamima Khan told Asia Focus.
“But they all still created Facebook accounts and try to check in as much as possible.”
Internet personalities are also fuelling the use of social platforms in Asia. Amrita Biswas, a Bengali-Australian, notes a trend of Bengali social influencers rising to popularity over the last couple of years. Raba Khan, for instance, entered the comedy scene in Bangladesh in 2014 with a YouTube channel called The Jhakanaka Project. It now has 100,000 subscribers and she has 100,000 followers of her Facebook page.
“On Facebook, more and more people are liking videos where [these Bengali influencers] talk about issues and situations they relate to,” Ms Biswas said. “I saw that one page had a million followers, which is interesting because I’m used to seeing US stars mostly.”
MORE COMPETITION
But not all young people are making Facebook their first choice these days. In the United States, Facebook’s base of 12- to 17-year-olds shrank last year by 3.4% to about 14.5 million, marking the second consecutive year of decline, after a 1.2% drop in 2016. The rise of Snapchat and Facebook-owned Instagram has been partly responsible for this decline, eMarketer senior forecasting analyst Oscar Orozco told The Independent.
“Both platforms have found success with [teens and tweens] since they are more aligned with how they communicate - that is, using visual content,” he said.
Online communication among young people increasingly involves “ephemeral visual content” - videos or photos that last for 24 hours before disappearing forever. Snapchat popularised the concept, while Instagram has adapted this idea further with its Stories feature.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged that 2017 was a “hard” year for the company, given some of the backlash it was seeing and criticism of its failure to deal with fake news and other abuses. But the company still reported revenue of US$12.97 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017 alone, with Asia the biggest contributor at $6.39 billion.
The number of monthly active users Facebook users rose from 1.59 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015 to 2.13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017. However, North American daily active users declined for the first time, with activity down by roughly 50 million hours a day. The number of users in the US and Canada logging on every day fell by 700,000 to 184 million.
Mr Zuckerberg might be anticipating time spent on the app to fall and as Facebook switches its focus to more “meaningful connection”, by making changes to its news feed, designed to fill it with content from friends and family rather than publishers and businesses.
These potentially radical changes might affect time spent on the site and company finances in the short term. Longer term, it needs to accept that Facebook Fatigue could spread as more people worry about the mental-health effects of too much social media use. Others, especially younger users, may simply start migrating to different platforms that emphasise visual content. In any case, the novelty of social media has worn off.
