Will the End of Social Media Impact Cross-Generational Relations?

Late last year, an article in the Atlantic magazine spoke about the disarray the world of social media services (SNS) is going through. With plunging usage at Facebook and corporate overhaul at Twitter, the platforms and the ways people interact with friends and strangers in cyberspace are due for a complete revolution. The article boldly predicted a world in which netizens are less dependent on SNS for social interactions, a change that is decades in the making and can make for some positive changes in the role that the internet plays in people's day-to-day lives.

To predict the complete demise of SNS is, unfortunately, quite premature at this stage. Even as the likes of Facebook and Twitter, text-based in their original orientation, suffer from loss of active users, more visual ones, from Instagram to TikTok, remains popular, especially among the younger crowd. As the legacy SNS platforms emulate the formulas for success from the newcomers to tap into ever-younger users, a great convergence in SNS functionalities and purpose may be underway. SNS may not die but simply evolve, continually, to fit shifting consumer demand.

But different segments of consumers surely evolve in different ways and speeds. While teenagers master the latest video and photo-editing functionalities of Instagram and TikTok, older netizens (myself included) are too stubborn to let go of what the young ones would consider outdated modes of online communication, such as blogs and forums. As a result, different parts of cyberspace are increasingly inhabited by different users, in age groups, formats, and beliefs, isolated from one another in parallel universes, walled off from one another via discrepancies in technologies and human networks. 

One might wonder how the wall across generations is all that notable given that they have always existed in one form or another even in the pre-internet age. Political studies show that age is a major factor in the liberal vs. conservative and urban vs. rural divide. Together with levels of education and the religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity that surrounds each community, age is a determining factor in ideologies, beliefs, and group identities. These invisible walls, just like domains in cyberspace, prevent communication across generations. 

What makes the cross-generational divide in SNS platforms special and different then? The answer might lie not so much about how people keep people of similar beliefs around them, but how they choose to express differing beliefs. The choice of text or pictures or videos matters, but just as important is the content that users choose to consume or not consume, leading to some information becoming viral among some social groups, but finding no resonance among others. The fact that so much information is generated and consumed so quickly in cyberspace, the divergence in information consumption can quickly lead to different generations almost living in different worlds with mutually exclusive input.

Nowhere is this mutual exclusivity more apparent in the world of digital advertising. While legacy SNS such as Facebook still dominates, the fact that different social groups use different platforms in different ways means that digital advertisers increasingly need to invest in advertising across different platforms. They need to use content formats that appeal to different population segments, even though the products or services being sold are supposed to appeal to all. The result is an increasingly costly arms race to fight the attention of netizens, even as netizens become more scattered across cyberspace.

Perhaps more than the death of SNS as an online mainstay, the scattering of different generations across different platforms means that, like in the real world, those targeting multiple generations will find their ventures prohibitively costly, in terms of time and energy spent. Procuring information, products, and services for a niche audience requires finding and going to niche platforms used by that particular audience, with almost zero chance of the same content being discovered by others. Gone are the days when a general ad on Facebook can earn new fans that the content was not originally intended to reach.

The focus on the niche will only exacerbate the cross-generational divide in cyberspace. More content creators will create information that tailors to specific people. So content creators and consumers will both be holed up in their niches, building up their own little worlds, with little incentive to stray away from what they already know. SNS started out as a digital public space that can connect people of different backgrounds and improve human understanding through diversity. Unfortunately, one big public space is gradually disintegrating into small ones that can only accommodate those of similar backgrounds.