Emigre Magazine Redesign

social media’s impact on us

contents social media’s growing impact on our lives summer allen | noah alejo

the rise of social media daniel morris | anna imark

can social media use affect our sleep? sove stasjon | beth watkins

can social media use affect our sleep? sove stasjon | beth watkins

the rise of social media daniel morris | anna imark

social media’s growing impact on our lives summer allen | noah alejo

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

Summer Allen - September 20, 2020

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 Social media use has skyrocketed over the past decade and a half. Whereas only five percent of adults in the United States reported using a social media platform in 2005, that number is now around 70 percent.

partners,” says Hall. One possible reason for this is because we tend to interact with our close loved ones through several different modalities—such as texts, emails, phone calls, and in-person time.

Growth in the number of people who use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat and other social media platforms — and the time spent on them—has garnered interest and concern among policymakers, teachers, parents, and clinicians about social media’s impacts on our lives and psychological well-being.

What about teens?

While the research is still in its early years — Facebook itself only celebrated its 15th birthday this year — media psychology researchers are beginningw to tease apart the ways in which time spent on these platforms is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.

Social media and relationships One particularly pernicious concern is whether time spent on social media sites is eating away at face-to-face time, a phenomenon known as social displacement.

Fears about social displacement are longstanding, as old as the telephone and probably older. “This issue of displacement has gone on for more than 100 years,” says Jeffrey Hall, PhD, director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. “No matter what the technology is,” says Hall, there is always a “cultural belief that it’s replacing face-to-face time with our close friends and family.”

When it comes to teens, a recent study by Jean Twenge, PhD, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and colleagues found that, as a cohort, high school seniors heading to college in 2016 spent an “ hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction” — such as going to parties, movies, or riding in cars together — compared with high school seniors in the late 1980s. As a group, this decline was associated with increased digital media use. However, at the individual level, more social media use was positively associated with more inperson social interaction.

Hall’s research interrogates that cultural belief. In one study, participants kept a daily log of time spent doing 19 different activities during weeks when they were and were not asked to abstain from using social media. In the weeks when people abstained from social media, they spent more time browsing the internet, working, cleaning, and doing household chores. However, during these same abstention periods, there was no difference in people’s time spent socializing with their strongest social ties.

The upshot? “I tend to believe, given my own work and then reading the work of others, that there’s very little evidence that social media directly displaces meaningful interaction with close relational

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

According to Hall, both phenomena could be happening in tandem — restrictive parenting could drive social media use and social media use could reduce the time teens spend together in person — but focusing on the latter places the culpability more on teens while ignoring the societal forces that are also at play.

The study also found that adolescents who spent the most time on social media and the least time in face-to-face social interactions reported the most loneliness.

While Twenge and colleagues posit that overall face-to-face interactions among teens may be down due to increased time spent on digital media, Hall says there’s a possibility that the relationship goes the other way.

Hall cites the work of danah boyd, PhD, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of Data & Society. “She [boyd] says that it’s not the case that teens are displacing their social face-to-face time through social media. Instead, she argues we got the causality reversed,” says Hall. “We are increasingly restricting teens’ ability to spend time with their peers . . . and they’re turning to social media to augment it.”

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The evidence is clear about one thing: Social media is popular among teens.

A 2018 Common Sense Media report found that 81 percent of teens use social media, and more than a third report using social media sites multiple times an hour. These statistics have risen dramatically over the past six years, likely driven by increased access to mobile devices. Rising along with these stats is a growing interest in the impact that social media is having on teen cognitive development and psychological well-being.

“What we have found, in general, is that social media presents both risks and opportunities for adolescents,” says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, PhD, a developmental psychologist, professor at Cal State LA, and associate director of the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Risks of expanding social networks Social media benefits teens by expanding their social networks and keeping them in touch with their peers and far-away friends and family. It is also a creativity outlet. In the Common Sense Media report, more than a quarter of teens said that “social media is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important for them for expressing themselves creatively.”

But there are also risks. The Common Sense Media survey found that 13 percent of teens reported being cyberbullied at least once. And social media can be a conduit for accessing inappropriate content like violent images or pornography. Nearly twothirds of teens who use social media

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 said they “‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ come across racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious-based hate content in social media.”

With all of these benefits and risks, how is social media affecting cognitive development? “What we have found at the Children’s Digital Media Center is that a lot of digital communication use and, in particular, social media use seems to be connected to offline developmental concerns,” says Subrahmanyam. “If you look at the adolescent developmental literature, the core issues facing youth are sexuality, identity, and intimacy,” says Subrahmanyam.

Her research suggests that different types of digital communication may involve different developmental issues.

For example, she has found that teens frequently talked about sex in chat rooms, whereas their use of blogs and social media appears to be more concerned with self-presentation and identity construction.

In particular, exploring one’s identity appears to be a crucial use of visually focused social media sites for adolescents. “Whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Instagram, there’s a lot of strategic self presentation, and it does seem to be in the service of identity,” says Subrahmanyam. “I think where it gets gray is that we don’t know if this is necessarily beneficial or if it harms.”

Remaining questions “It’s important to develop a coherent identity,” she says. “But within the context of social media — when it’s not clear that people are necessarily engaging in real self presentation and there’s a lot of ideal-self or false-self presentation — is that good?”

There are also more questions than answers when it comes to how social media affects the development of intimate relationships during adolescence. Does having a wide network of contacts — as is common in social media— lead to more superficial interactions and hinder intimacy?

Or, perhaps more

important, “Is the support that you get online as effective as the support that you get offline?” ponders Subrahmanyam. “We don’t know that necessarily.”

Based on her own research comparing text messages and face-to-face interactions, she says: “My hypothesis is that maybe digital interactions may be a little more ephemeral, they’re a little more fleeting, and you feel good, but that the feeling is lost quickly versus face-to-face interaction.”

However, she notes that today’s teens — being tech natives — may get less hung up on the online/offline dichotomy. “ We tend to think about online and offline as disconnected, but we have to recognize that for youth ... there’s so much more fluidity and connectedness between the real and the physical and the offline and the online,” she says.

In fact, growing up with digital technology may be changing teen brain development in ways we don’t yet know — and these changes may, in turn, change how teens relate to technology.

“Because the exposure to technology is happening so early, we have to be mindful of the possibility that perhaps there are changes happening at a neural level with early exposure,” says Subrahmanyam. “How youths interact with technology could just be qualitatively different from how we do it.”

In part two of this article, we will look at how social media affects psychological well-being and ways of using social media that are likely to amplify its benefits and decrease its harms.

Technology, Mind & Society 2019 APA’s Technology, Mind & Society conference showcases the most important current research in psychology and other disciplines concerning the interactions of humans and technology — research that moves us toward the goal of ensuring that technology enhances the lives of all people.

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 Technology, Mind & Society Keynote Speakers Sara Czaja, PhD is a professor of gerontology and the director of the Center on Aging and Behavioral Research in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Czaja’s research interests include aging and cognition, aging and healthcare access and service delivery, family caregiving, aging and technology, and functional assessment.

Camille Nebeker, EdD, MS is an assistant professor of Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health, School of Medicine at UC San Diego. Nebeker’s research focuses on community research capacity building and the ethical dimensions (e.g., consent, privacy, data management) of emerging technologies (e.g., pervasive sensors, ubiquitous computing) used in health research.

Albert “Skip” Rizzo, PhD is a clinical psychologist and director of Medical VR at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a research professor with the USC dept. of psychiatry and school of gerontology.

Rizzo has conducted research on the design, development and evaluation of Virtual Reality (VR) systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations.

Valerie Shute, PhD is the Mack & Effie Campbell Tyner Endowed professor in education in the department of educational psychology and Learning Systems at Florida State University. Her current research involves using games with stealth assessment to support learning — of cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge, skills and dispositions. For more details on her research and publications, read her bio on Florida State University’s website.

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Kumar Garg is the senior director for technology and society at Schmidt Futures.

His four core areas of work include: promoting the positive digital transformation of society by investing in data collaboratives that address concrete societal problems; expanding the number of people that are involved in discovery and innovation; investing in early stage risk-capital in nascent university research, high-potential people, and young organizations; and advancing public policy that sustains and leverages science and technology.

He previously helped shape policy for the Obama Administration, serving in a variety of roles in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

can social media use affect our sleep ?

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

We’ve seen an explosion in the use of social media platforms over the past decade, and how we are using social media is having a massive impact on our sleep.

Smart devices and social media apps keep us connected with the world.

But sometimes, we get so attached to them that it can become difficult to disconnect from them at appropriate times, like bedtime.

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 We’ve seen an explosion in the use of social media platforms over the past decade, and how we are using social media is having a massive impact on our sleep. So in this article we’re going to explore exactly how social media affect sleep. We’ll cover: Why we should all try to limit screentime as bedtime approaches.

How social media affects our sleep habits and can lead to sleep deprivation.

Steps you can take to reduce the impact of social media on your sleep.

Social media and sleep How many of us would admit to taking our phone to bed and scrolling through Facebook/Insta/Twitter before falling asleep? For lots of people, young and old, it’s now the norm to sleep with a mobile phone in our bedroom.1 2 Polls have shown that browsing social media is now one of the most common pre-sleep activities, between going to bed and falling sleep.

While it might feel relaxing to lie in bed and check a newsfeed, the reality is that this constant connectivity can have major negative effects on our sleep.

Are your social media habits leaving

“It’s not simply the fact that you’re looking at social media which keeps you awake, the type of content has a big impact too.”

you feeling sleep deprived?

Do you want to take back control of your sleep? Sleepstation can help.

Our programme builds on core sleep improvement principles with personalised support tailored to you.

The rise of social media In 2012, only 5% of adults were using social media; this had shot up to 70% at the last count (2020) and it’s even higher in younger adults, at over 90%.3 There’s also been huge increases in how long we spend on social media: amongst 16-64 year olds, average time spent has been creeping up, from 90 minutes per day in 2012, to now being about two and a half hours per day.4 This equates to around 1/6th of our waking hours!

But what happens when staying connected continues into bedtime?

How exactly does social media affect your sleep? Read on to see how your bedtime social media habits might be stopping you from getting a good night’s sleep.

Mobiles and melatonin: how looking at your phone can affect your sleep It’s well-established that looking at phone screens can impact sleep.

Mobiles emit mostly blue light, and these wavelengths are particularly good at keeping us productive and focussed, so perfectly suited for daytime phone usage.

At night-time, however, this isn’t ideal. At its simplest, exposure to light tells us to be awake, so looking at a bright light from a phone just before bed is telling your body it’s still time to be awake and not sleep time.

In the hours leading up to bedtime, as natural light levels decrease, our brains start to produce a hormone called melatonin, which causes our alertness to begin to dip. It signals to our bodies to wind down and prepare for sleep.

The blue light emitted by mobile

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 phones affects your melatonin levels more than any other wavelength does. It signals to your brain that it’s daylight, melatonin production is suppressed and sleep becomes delayed.5

example, after viewing a sad video), socially (a group chat on WhatsApp) and cognitively (reading content that gets you thinking) are all very important in determining the knockon effects it has on sleep.

Without melatonin signalling to us that we are sleepy, we remain awake and alert, in a state of ‘cognitive arousal’.

Passively scrolling through a newsfeed before turning off is less engaging and will affect your sleep less than getting involved in a heated debate on twitter.

Cognitive arousal: getting wound up when you should be winding down!

When you go to bed, your brain is preparing for sleep, but by looking at social media, you’re providing endless stimulation, signalling to your brain and body to remain active and keep engaged.

Similarly, photo-sharing platforms (generally more passive participation) will have less impact on sleep than those which actively engage their users to respond, such as messaging sites.8

you must use social media before you go to sleep, try to avoid areas that will stimulate you and demand high levels of engagement. Delayed bedtime: time spent surfing should be spent snoozing

It’s not simply the fact that you’re looking at social media which keeps you awake, the type of content has a big impact too.

This comes down to how much involvement the interaction calls for.

Looking at photos can be done quite serenely. Debating global politics is going to call for a more involved interaction.

How many times have you thought you’d just quickly check your social media account before going to sleep, only to find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of entertaining videos, photos, funny comments, chatting with friends, reading newsfeeds…?

And just like that, an hour or even two have passed.

How it affects you emotionally (for

The take home from this is that if

When we finally put down our

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 situation: you log off, but feel guilty because you’re no longer responding immediately to notifications, you can lose sleep worrying about what you’re missing and what people will think of you for not being available.

When we finally put downphones, it also takes us longer to fall asleep, the quality of sleep is reduced and you wake up feeling sleepy and unrefreshed.

Your bedtime has been displaced and additionally, you’ve lost some valuable sleep time, so your sleep duration will generally be shorter. Sleep displacement by social media is well-recognised amongst adolescents, and recent studies are beginning to show similar effects across adult age groups, too.

For people still in education, who have early start times, this is a particularly bad combination. For adults, this often leads to later wakeup times and has a knock-on effect on time available to complete tasks over the coming day.5 8 Fear of missing out (FOMO) A study from 2012 found that young people spend 54% of their internet time on social media.10 In teenagers, the fear of missing out (FOMO) and social disapproval are driving forces in the use of social media at night time. If you’re not connected, then you’re missing out; everybody else is online, so why are you not?9 Studies are starting to show similar results in adults; FOMO is definitely not unique to teenagers.8 Sadly, FOMO can feel like a no-win

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Or, you stay online and your sleep is compromised, you’re setting yourself up for anxiety, poor focus and increased risk of depression.

There’s no need to feel like you have to be available 24/7; we need to move away from these ways of thinking. Logging off or taking a break is totally fine. The bottom line is simple: we all need to sleep.

Denying yourself sleep to appear constantly online is just sabotaging your own well-being. Sleep deprivation can negatively affect your health in many different ways, so it seems crazy that we’d put our wellbeing at risk just to keep up to date

on social media.

If you feel like you’re struggling to disconnect and your sleep is being compromised, the team at Sleepstation can provide you with the tools you need to get a good night’s sleep.

Disturbed sleep: alerted by all those alerts When you do eventually fall asleep, this isn’t the end of social media’s hold on your brain. Message alerts, notifications, texts, updates…

In our eagerness to appear always available and connected, many of us further jeopardise our sleep by keeping our phone within grasp, on vibrate or unmuted.

by an alert, we often remain awake thinking about and anticipating further beeps and pings, which leads to fragmented sleep.

The best way to avoid this is to turn your phone off, put it on airplane mode or leave it on silent. Keeping it out of the bedroom at night would be ideal, but if this feels like a step too far, leave it on the other side of the room, as far away from your bed as possible.

The chicken and the egg: insomnia and social media It’s the middle of the night and you find yourself unable to sleep, so you

reach for your phone and check your social media accounts.

It’s an easy distraction from whatever is keeping you from sleeping, but then you find you can’t disengage, so you keep scrolling, you become more alert, so you can’t sleep. It’s a vicious cycle.

Research is now underway to examine the relationship between insomnia and social media use, and two important questions are being asked: Does night-time social media use cause insomnia? Or Do people with insomnia use social

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and at what times we connect. Social media usage around bedtime can have major repercussions for your sleep. Reducing exposure to social media can help you to disconnect and may improve your sleep quality.

Ideally, aim to wind-down your usage in the 2 hours before bedtime, but at a minimum, at least 30 minutes before bed.

Instead of scrolling through your phone, screen-free time will help prepare you for sleep. Maybe read a book, relax, take a bath, listen to music. Try whatever works to relax you, without involving looking at a screen.

If possible, keep your phone out of your bedroom at night! Buy a cheap alarm clock and leave your phone on charge in another room. You want to aim to create an ideal bedroom setup for good sleep, which means limiting distractions in the bedroom and making the space an inviting, calm and comfortable place to retreat to.

If you think you’re developing unhealthy sleep patterns due to social media then speak to us at Sleepstation. We can work with you to get to the root cause of your sleep issues and we’ll help you to improve your bedtime sleep habits.

Summary media to cope with their sleep problems?11 This angle is now being examined in greater depth, so for some, nighttime social media usage may actually be their way of coping with a sleep problem, as opposed to causing it.

Positive steps you can take Social media has many good points; it connects people, can bring friends and families closer together, it informs us and is entertaining. But sleep and social media do not make for good bedfellows.

We need to be mindful of how often

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Social media usage around bedtime can negatively affect how long and how well you sleep.

Looking at social media in bed can make it harder for you to fall asleep.

It can also reduce the amount of time you sleep for and leave you feeling unrefreshed the next day.

Try to limit (or stop) social media use a couple of hours before bedtime, to allow your body to wind down and prepare for sleep.

If possible, keep your mobile phone out of the bedroom-easier said than done!

Daniel Morris | Feb 18, 2022

When his catchy number ‘Without Me’ was released back in 2002, Mr Marshall Bruce Mathers III (A.K.A, Eminem) probably didn’t think that in only a couple of years the rest of the world would be calling for followers at the top of their lungs too.

Twenty years later, the reach, impact and overall influence of social media are almost inescapable.

In the decade in which we sit, colossal portions of our lives are lived online. True, the pandemic and the restrictions that accompanied it have played a part in increasing the amount that we live through the internet. Yet even so, much of global society had already long been on course for the level of ‘web world’ that now dominates our daily existence.

Social Media Influencer - Medium.com

A tool for both work and play, the net is an incredible resource that in modern society we would now almost doubtlessly be lost without. Yet over the last 20 years particularly, it has become the vehicle for such a gargantuan proportion of our social activity that for many it is now seen as integral to their interaction with others.

Social media in all of its forms has indisputably changed the world. In the positive, it has connected people personally and professionally, given friends and loved ones another avenue of long-distance contact, and brought people from all corners of the planet together in discussion of interests, advancement of causes and debate over views.

In the negative, it has provided a platform for those who would callously abuse, belittle, intimidate, bully and hurt others to do so from behind the shield of anonymity,

and verbally attack anyone, at any time, from any place.

Though it has brought both good and bad to global society, what cannot be denied is that social media is now a cog without which the machine of the modern world would struggle to function.

Here, we take a look at its fascinating growth, the birth and rise of some of the most popular platforms, and the mindblowing grip social media as a whole currently has on over half of the planet’s population.

Ah, when all we needed was MySpace and MSN, eh? Alas, they would come to be only a drop in the ocean...

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 The History Bit: Development of Social-Media Platforms Though the complex history of social media and its genesis goes back quite a bit further, SixDegrees, launched in 1997, is often regarded as the first real online social networking site.

The development of social media began with simple platforms such as GeoCities – one of the earliest social networking services – which was launched in 1994, followed by Classmates.com in 1995, and then SixDegrees two years later.

Unlike instant-messaging services that did not feature personal profiles and the like, SixDegrees was the first online site that was created for ‘real people’, using their real names and including friends lists and school affiliations. Little did its makers know that social media would one day come to drive the lives of the planet.

Fast-forward to 2015 (and following the launch and growth of some pretty big names in the social media sphere) research showed that the people of the world spent 22 per cent of their online time on social networks, their popularity having skyrocketed due to the widespread love affair with the smartphone.

In 2021, 4.33 billion people worldwide were using social media. That’s a lot. A very lot indeed...

Some of the most popular social media sites of today (and when we say ‘popular’, we mean those with more than a whopping 100 million registered users) include TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, QZone, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Weibo, Twitter and, of course, the big daddy of them all, Facebook. Depending on interpretation, other platforms that are referred to as social media services include YouTube, Quora, Snapchat, Pinterest, and WhatsApp.

Over Half the World Connected...

To repeat, there are 4.33 billion active social media users worldwide. In context, the world’s population is currently sat at around 7.9 billion, and you don’t have to be much of maths whizz to figure out that that means more than half the people on God’s green Earth are social media users.

According to DataReportal, there were 409 million new users on social media in the month of October 2021 alone.

The pandemic has certainly played its part in a recent boost in social media

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 users. Between October 2019 and October 2020, social network usage reportedly grew by a whopping 21.3%.

Holding Ourselves to Account...

As of last year, the average 18 to 34-yearold was running 8.4 profiles on social media. In India, that average was 11.5.

Such numbers make you wonder how we find the time to actually socialise.

However, multi-social media use is quite easily explained through the fact that many platforms that can technically be described as ‘social media’ are specialised services used by many users for one specific purpose – Instagram for photos, LinkedIn for work, YouTube for videos, etc. Even so, where do we find the time to run our online selves?

Getting Down to Business...

Reportedly, 81 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have social media accounts, with companies allocating an average of 14 to 20 per cent of their marketing budget to social media.

At the last check, 71 per cent of SMEs were marketing their wares or services via social media, and of this number, 52 per cent were creating a marketing post at least once a day.

There’s no denying that these days it’s a big part of what keeps the money machine turning...

The platforms to end all platforms (and we don’t mean heels)...

Facebook The indisputable Goliath of the whole bunch, with roughly 2.91 billion monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2021, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide.

As a business, Meta Platforms Inc owns Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. As such, during the first quarter of 2021, 3.45 billion people were reportedly visiting at least one of its core products.

A name now almost synonymous with internet use, Facebook is the third most visited

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

website in the world with an estimated 3.65 billion monthly visits, only being outranked by YouTube at 3.99 billion and Google at a colossal 17.37 billion.

Despite having come into the world way back in the murky days of the early noughties, Facebook is still one of the most downloaded apps on the planet.

Indeed, by the close of 2020, only TikTok had trumped Facebook in terms of the number of total downloads that year.

On average, users spend 34 minutes on Facebook every day. This may not sound like that much, but that’s 238 minutes a week (just shy of four hours) and 12,376 minutes a year (over eight-and-a-half full days).

Twitter With 199 million monetisable daily active users, Twitter continues to pack a punch in the social media pantheon.

Interestingly, according to recent stats,

people aged between 35 and 49 make up the largest demographic of Twitter users – 28.4 per cent of the total usage population. However, they are followed hot on their heels by the 25 to 34s, who comprise 26.6 per cent of the network’s user base.

On average, a rather sizeable 500 million tweets are shared per day. This works out at 6,000 tweets per second, 350,000 tweets per minute, and a whopping 200 billion tweets every year.

While the average Twitter user has just over 700 followers, it is of course possible to garner quite a few more than this, and all the easier if you’re one of them there famous types. Christiano Ronaldo is packing an impressive 92.1 million, and Justin Bieber is doing even better at 114.4 million.

But alas, both are falling short in comparison to Barack Obama, who is leading the pack with a mighty 130.3 million followers.

Instagram This photo-driven behemoth of a platform is flying high these days, at last count boasting a total of 1.074 billion active monthly users.

Instagram crossed the 1 billion line back in 2018, and as part of the Meta empire, is a mighty cog in a seemingly unstoppable machine.

Interestingly, 88 per cent of Instagram users are in fact outside the US, though the country does still boast 140 million account holders.

The sixth most visited website in the world, there are more than 200 million business accounts on Instagram, and over 500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every single day.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, and in turns out a lot of people agree...

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 LinkedIn Built to help people forge professional connections, LinkedIn now has more than 756 million users in over 200 countries.

Naturally, the majority of users are employed professionals, or graduates seeking work, and with this in mind it’s no great surprise that the 25s to 34s make up the biggest user demographic, representing a chunky 60.1 per cent of those with personal accounts. Currently there are over 57 million companies listed on LinkedIn along with around 15 million job openings.

A big sell with this platform is that it allows the publication of long-form content, as well as images, short text and videos, and this is undoubtedly responsible for a big part of its continued popularity in the business world.

TikTok With an impressive 850 million downloads in 2020, the triumphant video-focused TikTok became that year’s most popular social media platform.

Having picked up the pace in terms of users in 2019 (in fact crossing the 1 billion line that year), TikTok’s popularity became meteoric as the Covid pandemic progressed, proving a huge lockdown hit. Initially targeting users aged 18 and under, TikTok has now become popular with adults and at least 9 in 10 users open the app on a daily basis.

Today, TikTok is available in 155 countries and can be accessed in 75 languages. Although it’s still quite a new kid on the block in terms of the social media scene, TikTok has spent the last couple of years proving it is a force to be reckoned with, banking $1 billion in 2020 alone.

As it stands today, the company is worth over $50 billion.

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

social media’s growing impact on our lives media psychology researchers are beginning to tease apart the ways in which time spent on social media is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.

Summer Allen - September 20, 2020 Social media use has skyrocketed over the past decade and a half. Whereas only five percent of adults in the United States reported using a social media platform in 2005, that number is now around 70 percent.

to tease apart the ways in which time spent on these platforms is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.

is,” says Hall, there is always a “cultural belief that it’s replacing face-to-face time with our close friends and family.”

Social media and relationships

Growth in the number of people who use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat and other social media platforms — and the time spent on them—has garnered interest and concern among policymakers, teachers, parents, and clinicians about social media’s impacts on our lives and psychological well-being.

One particularly pernicious concern is whether time spent on social media sites is eating away at face-to-face time, a phenomenon known as social displacement.

Hall’s research interrogates that cultural belief. In one study, participants kept a daily log of time spent doing 19 different activities during weeks when they were and were not asked to abstain from using social media. In the weeks when people abstained from social media, they spent more time browsing the internet, working, cleaning, and doing household chores. However, during these same abstention periods, there was no difference in people’s time spent socializing with their strongest social ties.

While the research is still in its early years — Facebook itself only celebrated its 15th birthday this year — media psychology researchers are beginningw

Fears about social displacement are longstanding, as old as the telephone and probably older. “This issue of displacement has gone on for more than 100 years,” says Jeffrey Hall, PhD, director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. “No matter what the technology

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The upshot? “I tend to believe, given my

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 own work and then reading the work of others, that there’s very little evidence that social media directly displaces meaningful interaction with close relational partners,” says Hall. One possible reason for this is because we tend to interact with our close loved ones through several different modalities— such as texts, emails, phone calls, and in-person time.

What about teens?

Picture from Social Media Is Addictive. Do Regulators Need to Step In? https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/social-media-is-addictive-do-regulators-need-to-step-in

When it comes to teens, a recent study by Jean Twenge, PhD, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and colleagues found that, as a cohort, high school seniors heading to college in 2016 spent an “ hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction” — such as going to parties, movies, or riding in cars together — compared with high school seniors in the late 1980s. As a group, this decline was associated with increased digital media use. However, at the individual level, more social media use was positively associated with more in-person social interaction.

The study also found that adolescents who spent the most time on social media and the least time in face-to-face social interactions reported the most loneliness.

While Twenge and colleagues posit that overall face-to-face interactions among teens may be down due to increased time spent on digital media, Hall says there’s a possibility that the relationship goes the other way.

Hall cites the work of danah boyd, PhD, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of Data & Society. “She [boyd] says that it’s not the case that teens are displacing their social face-to-face time through social

media. Instead, she argues we got the causality reversed,” says Hall. “We are increasingly restricting teens’ ability to spend time with their peers . . . and they’re turning to social media to augment it.”

According to Hall, both phenomena could be happening in tandem — restrictive parenting could drive social media use and social media use could reduce the time teens spend together in person — but focusing on the latter places the culpability more on teens while ignoring the societal forces that are also at play.

The evidence is clear about one thing: Social media is popular among teens.

A 2018 Common Sense Media report found that 81 percent of teens use social media, and more than a third report using social media sites multiple times an hour. These statistics have risen dramatically over the past six years, likely driven by increased access to mobile devices. Rising along with these stats is a growing interest in the impact that social media is having on teen cognitive development and psychological well-being.

“What we have found, in general, is that social media presents both risks and opportunities for adolescents,” says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, PhD, a developmental psychologist, professor at Cal State LA, and associate director of the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Risks of expanding social networks Social media benefits teens by expanding their social networks and keeping them in touch with their peers and far-away friends and family.

It is also a creativity outlet. In the Common Sense Media report, more than a quarter of teens said that “social media is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important for them for expressing themselves creatively.”

But there are also risks. The Common Sense Media survey found that 13 percent of teens reported being cyberbullied at least once. And social media can be a conduit for accessing inappropriate content like violent images or pornography. Nearly twothirds of teens who use social media said they “‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ come across racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious-

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based hate content in social media.”

With all of these benefits and risks, how is social media affecting cognitive development? “What we have found at the Children’s Digital Media Center is that a lot of digital communication use and, in particular, social media use seems to be connected to offline developmental concerns,” says Subrahmanyam. “If you look at the adolescent developmental literature, the core issues facing youth are sexuality, identity, and intimacy,” says Subrahmanyam.

Her research suggests that different types of digital communication may involve different developmental issues.

For example, she has found that teens frequently talked about sex in chat rooms, whereas their use of blogs and social media appears to be more concerned with self-presentation and identity construction.

In particular, exploring one’s identity appears to be a crucial use of visually focused social media sites for

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 adolescents. “Whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Instagram, there’s a lot of strategic self presentation, and it does seem to be in the service of identity,” says Subrahmanyam. “I think where it gets gray is that we don’t know if this is necessarily beneficial or if it harms.”

Remaining questions

Picture from Break from social media during quarantine brings happiness https://beverlyhighlights.com/2020/04/01/break-from-social-media-during-quarantine-brings-happiness/

“It’s important to develop a coherent identity,” she says. “But within the context of social media — when it’s not clear that people are necessarily engaging in real self presentation and there’s a lot of ideal-self or false-self presentation — is that good?”

There are also more questions than answers when it comes to how social media affects the development of intimate relationships during adolescence. Does having a wide network of contacts — as is common in social media—lead to more superficial interactions and hinder intimacy?

Or, perhaps more important, “Is the support that you get online as effective as the support that you get offline?” ponders Subrahmanyam. “We don’t know that necessarily.”

the offline and the online,” she says.

In fact, growing up with digital technology may be changing teen brain development in ways we don’t yet know — and these changes may, in turn, change how teens relate to technology.

“Because the exposure to technology is happening so early, we have to be mindful of the possibility that perhaps there are changes happening at a neural level with early exposure,” says Subrahmanyam. “How youths interact with technology could just be qualitatively different from how we do it.”

In part two of this article, we will look at how social media affects psychological well-being and ways of using social media that are likely to amplify its benefits and decrease its harms.

Technology, Mind & Society 2019 APA’s Technology, Mind & Society conference showcases the most important current research in psychology and other disciplines concerning the interactions of humans and technology — research that moves us toward the goal of ensuring that technology enhances the lives of all people.

Based on her own research comparing text messages and face-to-face interactions, she says: “My hypothesis is that maybe digital interactions may be a little more ephemeral, they’re a little more fleeting, and you feel good, but that the feeling is lost quickly versus face-to-face interaction.”

However, she notes that today’s teens — being tech natives — may get less hung up on the online/offline dichotomy. “ We tend to think about online and offline as disconnected, but we have to recognize that for youth ...there’s so much more fluidity and connectedness between the real and the physical and

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

Technology, Mind & Society Keynote Speakers Sara Czaja, PhD is a professor of gerontology and the director of the Center on Aging and Behavioral Research in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Czaja’s research interests include aging and cognition, aging and healthcare access and service delivery, family caregiving, aging and technology, and functional assessment.

Camille Nebeker, EdD, MS is an assistant professor of Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health, School of Medicine at UC San Diego.

Nebeker’s research focuses on community research capacity building and the ethical dimensions (e.g., consent, privacy, data management) of emerging technologies (e.g., pervasive sensors, ubiquitous computing) used in health research.

Albert “Skip” Rizzo, PhD is a clinical psychologist and director of Medical VR at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a research professor with the USC dept. of psychiatry and school of gerontology.

Rizzo has conducted research on the design, development and evaluation of Virtual Reality (VR) systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical

Valerie Shute, PhD is the Mack & Effie Campbell Tyner Endowed professor in education in the department of educational psychology and Learning Systems at Florida State University. Her current research involves using games with stealth assessment to support learning — of cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge, skills and dispositions.

For more details on her research and publications, read her bio on Florida State University’s website.

Kumar Garg is the senior director for technology and society at Schmidt Futures. His four core areas of work include: promoting the positive digital transformation of society by investing in data collaboratives that address concrete societal problems; expanding the number of people that are involved in discovery and innovation; investing in early stage risk-capital in nascent university research, high-potential people, and young organizations; and advancing public policy that sustains and leverages science and technology.

He previously helped shape policy for the Obama Administration, serving in a variety of roles in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

can social media use affect our sleep?

Sove Stasjon Smart devices and social media apps keep us connected with the world. But sometimes, we get so attached to them that it can become difficult to disconnect from them at appropriate times, like bedtime.

We’ve seen an explosion in the use of social media platforms over the past decade, and how we are using social media is having a massive impact on our sleep. So in this article we’re going to explore exactly how social media affect sleep. We’ll cover: Why we should all try to limit screentime as bedtime approaches.

How social media affects our sleep habits and can lead to sleep deprivation.

Steps you can take to reduce the impact of social media on your sleep.

negative effects on our sleep.

Are your social media habits leaving you feeling sleep deprived?

Do you want to take back control of your sleep? Sleepstation can help.

Our programme builds on core sleep improvement principles with personalised support tailored to you.

The rise of social media

Social media and sleep How many of us would admit to taking our phone to bed and scrolling through Facebook/Insta/Twitter before falling asleep? For lots of people, young and old, it’s now the norm to sleep with a mobile phone in our bedroom.1 2 Polls have shown that browsing social media is now one of the most common pre-sleep activities, between going to bed and falling sleep. While it might feel relaxing to lie in bed and check a newsfeed, the reality is that this constant connectivity can have major

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In 2012, only 5% of adults were using social media; this had shot up to 70% at the last count (2020) and it’s even higher in younger adults, at over 90%.3 There’s also been huge increases in how long we spend on social media: amongst 16-64 year olds, average time spent has been creeping up, from 90 minutes per day in 2012, to now being about two and a half hours per day.4 This equates to around 1/6th of our waking hours!

But what happens when staying connected continues into bedtime? How exactly does social media affect your sleep? Read on to see how your bedtime social media habits might be stopping you from getting a good night’s sleep.

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 Mobiles and melatonin: how looking at your phone can affect your sleep It’s well-established that looking at phone screens can impact sleep. Mobiles emit mostly blue light, and these wavelengths are particularly good at keeping us productive and focussed, so perfectly suited for daytime phone usage.

At night-time, however, this isn’t ideal.

At its simplest, exposure to light tells us to be awake, so looking at a bright light from a phone just before bed is telling your body it’s still time to be awake and not sleep time.

In the hours leading up to bedtime, as natural light levels decrease, our brains start to produce a hormone called melatonin, which causes our alertness to begin to dip. It signals to our bodies to wind down and prepare for sleep.

The blue light emitted by mobile phones affects your melatonin levels more than any other wavelength does. It signals to your brain that it’s daylight, melatonin production is suppressed and sleep becomes delayed.5 Without melatonin signalling to us that we are sleepy, we remain awake and alert, in a state of ‘cognitive arousal’.

Cognitive arousal: getting wound up when you should be winding down!

When you go to bed, your brain is preparing for sleep, but by looking at social media, you’re providing endless stimulation, signalling to your brain and body to remain active and keep engaged.

It’s not simply the fact that you’re looking at social media which keeps you awake, the type of content has a big impact too.

How it affects you emotionally (for example, after viewing a sad video), socially (a group chat on WhatsApp) and cognitively (reading content that gets you thinking) are all very important in determining the knock-on effects it has on sleep.

Passively scrolling through a newsfeed before turning off is less engaging and will affect your sleep less than getting involved in a heated debate on twitter.

Similarly, photo-sharing platforms (generally more passive participation) will have less impact on sleep than those which actively engage their users to

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

respond, such as messaging sites.8 This comes down to how much involvement the interaction calls for.

Looking at photos can be done quite serenely. Debating global politics is going to call for a more involved interaction.

The take home from this is that if you must use social media before you go to sleep, try to avoid areas that will stimulate you and demand high levels of engagement. Delayed bedtime: time spent surfing should be spent snoozing How many times have you thought you’d just quickly check your social media account before going to sleep, only to find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of entertaining videos, photos, funny comments, chatting with friends, reading newsfeeds…? And just like that, an hour or even two have passed.

For people still in education, who have early start times, this is a particularly bad combination. For adults, this often leads to later wake-up times and has a knock-on effect on time available to complete tasks over the coming day.5 8

you for not being available.

Fear of missing out (FOMO)

There’s no need to feel like you have to be available 24/7; we need to move away from these ways of thinking. Logging off or taking a break is totally fine. The bottom line is simple: we all need to sleep.

A study from 2012 found that young people spend 54% of their internet time on social media.10 In teenagers, the fear of missing out (FOMO) and social disapproval are driving forces in the use of social media at night time. If you’re

Or, you stay online and your sleep is compromised, you’re setting yourself up for anxiety, poor focus and increased risk of depression.

Denying yourself sleep to appear constantly online is just sabotaging your own well-being.

“In our eagerness to appear always available Sleep deprivation can negatively affect your and connected, many of us further jeopardise health in many different ways, so it seems crazy our sleep by keeping our phone within grasp, on that we’d put our wellbeing at risk just to vibrate or unmuted.” keep up to date on social media.

When we finally put down our phones, it also takes us longer to fall asleep, the quality of sleep is reduced and you wake up feeling sleepy and unrefreshed.

Your bedtime has been displaced and additionally, you’ve lost some valuable sleep time, so your sleep duration will generally be shorter. Sleep displacement by social media is well-recognised amongst adolescents, and recent studies are beginning to show similar effects across adult age groups, too.

not connected, then you’re missing out; everybody else is online, so why are you not?9

If you feel like you’re struggling to disconnect and your sleep is being compromised, the team at Sleepstation can provide you with the tools you need to get a good night’s sleep.

Studies are starting to show similar results in adults; FOMO is definitely not unique to teenagers.8

Disturbed sleep: alerted by all those alerts

Sadly, FOMO can feel like a no-win situation: you log off, but feel guilty because you’re no longer responding immediately to notifications, you can lose sleep worrying about what you’re missing and what people will think of

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When you do eventually fall asleep, this isn’t the end of social media’s hold on your brain. Message alerts, notifications, texts, updates…

In our eagerness to appear always available and connected, many of us

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 further jeopardise our sleep by keeping our phone within grasp, on vibrate or unmuted.

Do people with insomnia use social media to cope with their sleep problems?11

Plus, once sleep has been disturbed by an alert, we often remain awake thinking about and anticipating further beeps and pings, which leads to fragmented sleep.

This angle is now being examined in greater depth, so for some, night-time social media usage may actually be their way of coping with a sleep problem, as opposed to causing it.

The best way to avoid this is to turn your phone off, put it on airplane mode or leave it on silent. Keeping it out of the bedroom at night would be ideal, but if this feels like a step too far, leave it on the other side of the room, as far away from your bed as possible.

Positive steps you can take

The chicken and the egg: insomnia and social media

We need to be mindful of how often and at what times we connect. Social media usage around bedtime can have major repercussions for your sleep. Reducing exposure to social media can help you to disconnect and may improve your sleep quality.

It’s the middle of the night and you find yourself unable to sleep, so you reach for your phone and check your social media accounts.

It’s an easy distraction from whatever is keeping you from sleeping, but then you find you can’t disengage, so you keep scrolling, you become more alert, so you can’t sleep. It’s a vicious cycle.

Research is now underway to examine the relationship between insomnia and social media use, and two important questions are being asked: Does night-time social media use cause insomnia? Or

Social media has many good points; it connects people, can bring friends and families closer together, it informs us and is entertaining. But sleep and social media do not make for good bedfellows.

Ideally, aim to wind-down your usage in the 2 hours before bedtime, but at a minimum, at least 30 minutes before bed.

Instead of scrolling through your phone, screen-free time will help prepare you for sleep. Maybe read a book, relax, take a bath, listen to music. Try whatever works to relax you, without involving looking at a screen.

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If possible, keep your phone out of your bedroom at night! Buy a cheap alarm clock and leave your phone on charge in another room. You want to aim to create an ideal bedroom setup for good sleep, which means limiting distractions in the bedroom and making the space an inviting, calm and comfortable place to retreat to.

If you think you’re developing unhealthy sleep patterns due to social media then speak to us at Sleepstation.

We can work with you to get to the root cause of your sleep issues and we’ll help you to improve your bedtime sleep habits.

Summary Social media usage around bedtime can negatively affect how long and how well you sleep.

Looking at social media in bed can make it harder for you to fall asleep.

It can also reduce the amount of time you sleep for and leave you feeling unrefreshed the next day.

Try to limit (or stop) social media use a couple of hours before bedtime, to allow your body to wind down and prepare for sleep.

If possible, keep your mobile phone out of the bedroom-easier said than done!

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

Social Media Influencer - Medium.com

The Rise of Social Media How the World Became Connected Daniel Morris | Feb 18, 2002

When his catchy number ‘Without Me’ was released back in 2002, Mr Marshall Bruce Mathers III (A.K.A, Eminem) probably didn’t think that in only a couple of years the rest of the world would be calling for followers at the top of their lungs too.

society we would now almost doubtlessly be lost without. Yet over the last 20 years particularly, it has become the vehicle for such a gargantuan proportion of our social activity that for many it is now seen as integral to their interaction with others.

Twenty years later, the reach, impact and overall influence of social media are almost inescapable.

Social media in all of its forms has indisputably changed the world. In the positive, it has connected people personally and professionally, given friends and loved ones another avenue of long-distance contact, and brought people from all corners of the planet together in discussion of interests, advancement of causes and debate over views.

In the decade in which we sit, colossal portions of our lives are lived online.

True, the pandemic and the restrictions that accompanied it have played a part in increasing the amount that we live through the internet. Yet even so, much of global society had already long been on course for the level of ‘web world’ that now dominates our daily existence.

A tool for both work and play, the net is an incredible resource that in modern

In the negative, it has provided a platform for those who would callously abuse, belittle, intimidate, bully and hurt others to do so from behind the shield of

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anonymity, and verbally attack anyone, at any time, from any place.

Though it has brought both good and bad to global society, what cannot be denied is that social media is now a cog without which the machine of the modern world would struggle to function.

Here, we take a look at its fascinating growth, the birth and rise of some of the most popular platforms, and the mindblowing grip social media as a whole currently has on over half of the planet’s population.

Ah, when all we needed was MySpace and MSN, eh? Alas, they would come to be only a drop in the ocean...

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 The History Bit: Development of Social-Media Platforms Though the complex history of social media and its genesis goes back quite a bit further, SixDegrees, launched in 1997, is often regarded as the first real online social networking site.

The development of social media began with simple platforms such as GeoCities – one of the earliest social networking services – which was launched in 1994, followed by Classmates.com in 1995, and then SixDegrees two years later.

Unlike instant-messaging services that did not feature personal profiles and the like, SixDegrees was the first online site that was created for ‘real people’, using their real names and including friends lists and school affiliations. Little did its makers know that social media would one day come to drive the lives of the planet.

Fast-forward to 2015 (and following the launch and growth of some pretty big names in the social media sphere) research showed that the people of the world spent 22 per cent of their online time on social networks, their popularity having skyrocketed due to the widespread love affair with the smartphone.

users. Between October 2019 and October 2020, social network usage reportedly grew by a whopping 21.3%.

Holding Ourselves to Account...

As of last year, the average 18 to 34-yearold was running 8.4 profiles on social media. In India, that average was 11.5.

Such numbers make you wonder how we find the time to actually socialise.

However, multi-social media use is quite easily explained through the fact that many platforms that can technically be described as ‘social media’ are specialised services used by many users for one specific purpose – Instagram for photos, LinkedIn for work, YouTube for videos, etc. Even so, where do we find the time to run our online selves?

Getting Down to Business...

Reportedly, 81 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have social media accounts, with companies allocating an average of 14 to 20 per cent of their marketing budget to social media.

In 2021, 4.33 billion people worldwide were using social media. That’s a lot. A very lot indeed...

Some of the most popular social media sites of today (and when we say ‘popular’, we mean those with more than a whopping 100 million registered users) include TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, QZone, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Weibo, Twitter and, of course, the big daddy of them all, Facebook. Depending on interpretation, other platforms that are referred to as social media services include YouTube, Quora, Snapchat, Pinterest, and WhatsApp.

Over Half the World Connected...

To repeat, there are 4.33 billion active social media users worldwide. In context, the world’s population is currently sat at around 7.9 billion, and you don’t have to be much of maths whizz to figure out that that means more than half the people on God’s green Earth are social media users.

According to DataReportal, there were 409 million new users on social media in the month of October 2021 alone.

The pandemic has certainly played its part in a recent boost in social media

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issue 01 | emigre | may 2020 At the last check, 71 per cent of SMEs were marketing their wares or services via social media, and of this number, 52 per cent were creating a marketing post at least once a day.

visited website in the world with an estimated 3.65 billion monthly visits, only being outranked by YouTube at 3.99 billion and Google at a colossal 17.37 billion.

There’s no denying that these days it’s a big part of what keeps the money machine turning...

Despite having come into the world way back in the murky days of the early noughties, Facebook is still one of the most downloaded apps on the planet.

Indeed, by the close of 2020, only TikTok had trumped Facebook in terms of the number of total downloads that year.

The platforms to end all platforms (and we don’t mean heels)...

Facebook The indisputable Goliath of the whole bunch, with roughly 2.91 billion monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2021, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide.

As a business, Meta Platforms Inc owns Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. As such, during the first quarter of 2021, 3.45 billion people were reportedly visiting at least one of its core products.

A name now almost synonymous with internet use, Facebook is the third most

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On average, users spend 34 minutes on Facebook every day. This may not sound like that much, but that’s 238 minutes a week (just shy of four hours) and 12,376 minutes a year (over eight-and-a-half full days).

Twitter With 199 million monetisable daily active users, Twitter continues to pack a punch in the social media pantheon.

Interestingly, according to recent stats, people aged between 35 and 49 make up the largest demographic of Twitter users – 28.4 per cent of the total usage population. However, they are followed hot on their heels by the 25 to 34s, who comprise 26.6 per cent of the network’s user base.

On average, a rather sizeable 500 million tweets are shared per day. This works out at 6,000 tweets per second, 350,000 tweets per minute, and a whopping 200 billion tweets every year.

While the average Twitter user has just over 700 followers, it is of course possible to garner quite a few more than this, and all the easier if you’re one of them there famous types. Christiano Ronaldo is packing an impressive 92.1 million, and Justin Bieber is doing even better at 114.4 million.

But alas, both are falling short in comparison to Barack Obama, who is leading the pack with a mighty 130.3 million followers.

Instagram This photo-driven behemoth of a platform is flying high these days, at last count boasting a total of 1.074 billion active monthly users.

Instagram crossed the 1 billion line back in 2018, and as part of the Meta empire, is a mighty cog in a seemingly unstoppable machine.

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Interestingly, 88 per cent of Instagram users are in fact outside the US, though the country does still boast 140 million account holders.

The sixth most visited website in the world, there are more than 200 million business accounts on Instagram, and over 500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every single day.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, and in turns out a lot of people agree...

LinkedIn Built to help people forge professional connections, LinkedIn now has more than 756 million users in over 200 countries.

Naturally, the majority of users are employed professionals, or graduates seeking work, and with this in mind it’s no great surprise that the 25s to 34s make up the biggest user demographic, representing a chunky 60.1 per cent of those with personal accounts. Currently there are over 57 million companies listed on LinkedIn along with around 15 million job openings.

A big sell with this platform is that it allows the publication of long-form content, as well as images, short text and videos, and this is undoubtedly responsible for a big part of its continued popularity in the business world.

TikTok With an impressive 850 million downloads in 2020, the triumphant video-focused TikTok became that year’s most popular social media platform.

Having picked up the pace in terms of users in 2019 (in fact crossing the 1 billion line that year), TikTok’s popularity became meteoric as the Covid pandemic progressed, proving a huge lockdown hit. Initially targeting users aged 18 and under, TikTok has now become popular with adults and at least 9 in 10 users open the app on a daily basis.

Today, TikTok is available in 155 countries and can be accessed in 75 languages. Although it’s still quite a new kid on the block in terms of the social media scene, TikTok has spent the last couple of years proving it is a force to be reckoned with, banking $1 billion in 2020 alone.

As it stands today, the company is worth over $50 billion.

issue 01 | emigre | may 2020

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