A new U.K study revealed that older teens consider Facebook “dead and buried” and wouldn’t even want to be associated with it.
According to the Global Social Media Study, which studied the usage of social networking sites in eight countries, teen users aged 16 to 18 are no longer into Facebook because their parents and other older users flood the social networking site.
Therefore, other social sites like the Facebook-acquired Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are among the newest nests for the majority of the key age group respondents.
Daniel Miller, lead anthropologist on the research team and a professor of material culture in the University College of London told the Guardian, “Facebook is not just on the slide - it is basically dead and buried.”
“Mostly they feel embarrassed to even be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives,” he added.
Functionality and sophistication are not the issues for the shift, even privacy and security. Teens just wanted a private space of their own, away from the scrutinizing eyes of their parents, relatives, or other older people.
The results of the study showed that 40 percent of the participants had never changed their privacy settings while 80 percent said they “were not concerned or did not care” if their personal information was accessed and seen by anyone.
Razvan Nicolescu, an anthropologist and author of the study, told The Guardian, “Most individuals try to present themselves online the way they think society is expecting them to. In other words, there is a great consistency between the way people present themselves online and what they think society thinks about them.”
“It seems that social media works not towards change – of society, notions of individuality and connectedness, and so on – but rather as a conservative force that tends to strengthen the conventional social relations and to deify society as Italians enjoy and recognize it.”
