ARE YOU LIVING, OR POSTING?

Nowadays, teenagers and young adults are spending a lot of time on social media. In fact, Internet became a part of everybody’s life, and is taking more and more room in our daily life.

Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users.

Along with being the most popular social media site, Facebook users also visit the site with high levels of frequency. Fully 74% of Facebook users say they visit the site daily, with around half (51%) saying they do several times a day. The share of Facebook users who visit the site on a daily basis is statistically unchanged compared with 2016, when 76% of Facebook users reported they visited the site daily.

While the overall share of Americans who use Snapchat is smaller than that of Facebook, a similar share of Snapchat users (49%) say they use the platform multiple times per day. All told, a majority of Snapchat (63%) and Instagram (60%) users indicate that they visit these platforms on a daily basis. The share of Instagram users who visit the platform daily has increased slightly since 2016 when 51% of Instagram users were daily visitors. (Note: this is the first year the Center has specifically asked about the frequency of Snapchat use in a telephone poll.)

In addition to adopting Snapchat and Instagram at high rates, the youngest adults also stand out in the frequency with which they use these two platforms. Some 82% of Snapchat users ages 18 to 24 say they use the platform daily, with 71% indicating that they use it multiple times per day. Similarly, 81% of Instagram users in this age group visit the platform on daily basis, with 55% reporting that they do so several times per day.

In fact, we can daily see posts on social media such as Snapchat and instagram, that represent what people are doing during each day. But sometimes it gets too important. As an example, we can see people sharing everyday people they see, food they eat, book they read, places they visits…etc. Most of instagramers think about taking a picture and sharing it to have comments feedbacks, rather than to enjoy the moment. Such as snapchat, where we have seen few proposals that had been filmed by one of the two futur married. Do you think it is normal to have you phone in a hand, filming what is going on, and a ring on the other, proposing to your futur wife ? Isn’t is a waste of time, and a waste of real experiences and emotions ? As influencers are now earning enough money to live with their instagram account, it is really complicated to define the limite between our virtual life and our real life.

What about you ? Do you think we are exposing our life too much ? Do you think we should even more live our life and enjoy feelings and experiences by living it and not by posting pictures ?