当代年轻人对社交媒体失去兴趣的分析Analysis on young people’s losing interest

1.0 Introduction介绍

在过去的几年里，人们听到了Facebook年轻用户数量减少的警报。”《时代周刊》称，自2011年以来，超过1100万青少年用户逃离了Facebook（Jabeur、Nait Sidi Moh和Zeadally，2018年）。然而，这些文章中的许多推测是那些逃离Facebook的年轻人选择了真正的照片分享应用程序Instagram或其他社交媒体。换句话说，他们认为年轻人远离了Facebook，而不是社交媒体（Richey和Ravishankar，2017年）。然而，现在，新的数据越来越清晰：青少年正在逃离传统的社交媒体，如Facebook、Twitter，他们转而使用少数民族人使用的一些工具，如信使或Snapchat（Giunchiglia、Zeni、Gobbi、Bignotti和Bison，2018年）。通过这些工具，他们不会为每个人发布一些重要的信息，而是与亲密的朋友分享更多的私人信息，例如自拍、关于班级情况的投诉（Robles、Didomenico和Raclaw，2018年）。社会媒体的兴起与青年人的追求息息相关。年轻人是第一批接受和使用社交媒体的人（Warner-S_Derholm、Bertsch、Sawe、Lee和Fatilua，2018年）。所以，为什么现在年轻人选择离开传统的社会媒体，这是一个值得深入研究的问题。本研究结合作者自己使用Facebook的经验，以及朋友的经验，分析年轻人对社交媒体失去兴趣的原因。

In the past few years, the alarm for reduced number of young users of Facebook has been heard. "Time" said that since 2011, more than 11 million teenage users have fled Facebook (Jabeur, Nait-Sidi-Moh and Zeadally, 2018). However, many of these articles have speculated that the young people who fled Facebook have gone to choose the real photo-sharing APP- Instagram or other social media. In other words, they thought that young people got away from Facebook, not social media (Richey and Ravishankar, 2017). Now, however, new data is increasingly clear: teens are fleeing traditional social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and they have turned to use some tools that are used by minority people, such as Messenger or Snapchat (Giunchiglia, Zeni, Gobbi, Bignotti and Bison, 2018). Through the tools, they don’t publish some big information for everyone, but share some more private information with close friends, such as selfie, complaints about class situation (Robles, DiDomenico and Raclaw, 2018). The rise of social media is closely related to the pursuit of young people. Young people are the first group of people who accept and use social media (Warner-Søderholm, Bertsch, Sawe, Lee and Fatilua, 2018). So why young people choose to leave traditional social media now, this is a question worthy of deep study. This study combined with the author’s own experience of using Facebook, as well as his friends' experience to analyze why young people are losing interest in social media.

2.0 Main body主体

本节将从三个方面分析年轻人对社交媒体失去兴趣的原因

This section will analyze why young people lose interest in social media from three aspects.

2.1 Fail to meet young people’s needs for free expression  不能满足青年人自由表达的需要

年轻人总是被认为是叛逆的，但这仅仅是因为他们已经有了独立的思想，但他们没有被认真对待（Wei和Gao，2017年）。因此，年轻人需要一个平台，让他们自由表达自己的意见。同时，他们渴望自己的意见能够被发现和识别。社交媒体本身是一个相对宽容的环境。青年可以利用社交媒体自由表达自己。同时，也能引起人们甚至周围社会的关注，满足年轻人自我表达的需要。然而，随着使用社交媒体的人数不断增加，尤其是教师、家长、上级和其他老年人也学会了使用社交媒体，并注意年轻人的社交媒体账户，尤其是当家长习惯于监控自己的孩子时。德伦的在线活动中，年轻人在使用社交媒体时开始感到尴尬（Robles、Didomenico和Raclaw，2018年）。因为很少有大学生希望他们的父母看到他们如何度过周末的闲暇夜晚的照片，很少有学生愿意让他们的老师知道他们对学校工作的抱怨。同时，随着社会媒体在社会中影响力的不断增强，它逐渐成为非主流信息传播渠道的主流信息传播渠道（Bailey、Bonefield和Arias，2018）。越来越多的年轻人了解到，未来，雇主、大学办公室甚至银行可能会使用社交媒体数据对其进行评估（Sutcliffe、Binder和Dunbar，2018年）。因此，许多人似乎更具战略性地使用社交媒体。例如，一些学生精心计划在Facebook或LinkedIn文件中打开的内容，并选择其他更私密的平台来共享真实信息。总之，随着社会媒体影响力的不断增强，它阻碍了青年人的自由表达，使青年人对自由表达失去了兴趣。

Young people are always considered to be rebellious, but it is only because they already have independent thoughts but they are not taken seriously (Wei and Gao, 2017). Thus young people need a platform that allows them to express their opinions freely. At the same time, they long for that their opinions can be noticed and identified. Social media itself is a relatively tolerant environment. Youth can use social media to freely express themselves. At the same time, they can also arouse the attention of people and even the society around them to meet the needs of young people for self-expression. However, as the number of people using social media continues to expand, especially when teachers, parents, superiors and other seniors have also learned to use social media and paid attention to young people’s social media accounts, especially when parents are accustomed to monitoring their children’s online activities, young people are beginning to encounter embarrassment when using social media (Robles, DiDomenico and Raclaw, 2018). Because few college students want their parents to see pictures about how they spend their leisure weekend evenings, and few students are willing to let their teachers know what they complain about school work. At the same time, with the increasing influence of social media in the society, it has gradually become a mainstream information transmission channel from a non-mainstream information dissemination channel (Bailey, Bonifield and Arias, 2018). More and more young people have learned that in future, employers and universities offices and even banks may use social media data to evaluate them (Sutcliffe, Binder and Dunbar, 2018). Thus many people seem to use social media more strategically. For example, some students meticulously plan contents that are open in files of Facebook or LinkedIn, and they choose other more private platforms for sharing real information. All in all, with the increasing influence of social media, it has hindered the free expression of young people, and thus young people have lost interest in it.

2.2 Fail to satisfy young people's identification for self identity

The use of social media first and foremost began among young people (Lee, Shin and Hong, 2018). Using social media, young people can interact with other young friends more easily and conveniently (Dokuz and Celik, 2017). Using social media has also become a lifestyle and hobby for young people. The use of social media is also a kind of identification of young people for their own identity. That is, social media is a representative of fashion, science and technology, and is a communication platform for young people (Bailey, Bonifield and Arias, 2018). It is totally different from the communication modes of the older generation. However, as the user groups grow older, the original young people are now entering their middle age, and now the elderly have also mastered the use of social media in various ways (Warner-Søderholm, Bertsch, Sawe, Lee and Fatilua, 2018). Therefore, for young people today, social media It is no longer a young person's patent. It no longer represents fashion and technology. It has become one of the popular communication tools used by the general public. Social media can no longer satisfy young people's recognition of their identity. For example, many parents communicate with their children through social software, and grandmas also thumb up when they see photos published in the social media of their grandchildren’s. This makes young people feel that there is no essential difference between social media and traditional communication methods. They lose interest in using social media and instead using some less famous but more characteristic communication software, such as Messenger or Snapchat, because older people usually do not use of those kinds of software, and it is mainly young people who are using it (Sutcliffe, Binder and Dunbar, 2018). The software is more representative of fashion, youth, and technology, and is more able to satisfy young people's identification with their own identity (Dokuz and Celik, 2017).

2.3 Fail to meet the new needs of young people

Now more and more young people are affected by postmodernism. Postmodernism is the criticism and deconstruction of the wholeness, centrality, identity and other modes of thinking that emerges in the modernization process (Dunn and Castro, 2012). The post-modernism's decentralized consciousness and multi-value orientation make people's ideas no longer rigidly adhere to social ideals, meaning of life, a country’s future, traditional morality, etc., thereby enabling people’s thoughts to be fully liberated and people have a deeper understanding of their self-consciousness (Patton, 2015). They have more and more emphasis on personalization and self-awareness, their needs for social media largely differ from those of young people 10 years ago, for example, the degree of concern that young people nowadays have for politics, public affairs, international events is greatly reduced, their desire to communicate with strangers is decreasing, and they are more willing to communicate with their familiar circles (Whaite, Shensa, Sidani, Colditz and Primack, 2018). Although social media such as Facebook can provide a lot of functions for young people to experience, in fact, many functions are not needed by young people, but make the software become larger and consume more memory of mobile phones (Whaite, Shensa, Sidani, Colditz and Primack, 2018). A software like Snapchat is popular for young people today, although it has much less functionality, it can provide young people with the most needed features, such as Snapchat's post-immediate burning feature, what the users chat will be automatically burned after the message is read by the other person, which is not just a cool chat method, it allows the users to gossip unworriedly and send important information more securely (Laurel and Sandström, 2018). This feature can effectively protect young people’s privacy. On the contrary, the texts and pictures posted by young people on Facebook will be permanently saved if they are not deleted by the users (Warner-Søderholm, Bertsch, Sawe, Lee and Fatilua, 2018). This may cause personal privacy to be leaked. To maintain their online image, young people have to spend time on managing information published in their own social media.#p#分页标题#e#

3.0 Conclusion

Young people are the earliest users and fans of social media, but more and more young people are starting to lose interest in using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. The reason is mainly from three aspects. First, information published by young people on social media may be monitored by parents or used by schools and employers as a tool to evaluate them. This prevents young people from freely expressing their ideas and information. Second, social media has become more and more influential in today’s society and it has become one of the mainstream media. People of all ages in thee society use social media such as Facebook, which makes young people feel that the social media is no longer the representative of young, fashion, and technology, these social media can't satisfy young people's identification for self-identity. Finally, contemporary young people are more self-conscious and self-aware. The social media can no longer meet their needs, and those communication tools with few features but special functions may better meet the needs of young people. All in all, young people have lost interest in social media, which is determined by the own reasons of social media itself, the other reasons may lie in the changes in young people's needs, and the development of the social media industry, for instance, social media such as Facebook, needs to take more measures to recover young people. 

 

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