northYes, social media is not dead. More than two billion people connect every day to Facebook, one billion every month to TikTok and, despite repeated scandals, 250 million every day to seem like a new era of the Web.
We turn to social media every day, en masse. But there we publish less and less. Adam Mosseri himself, the head of Instagram, acknowledged this last year in a podcast: “You no longer share many personal moments in the feedlike you did five or ten years ago. You share them more in “stories”, or in private messages. » In particular, he explained that teenagers spent most of their time in the app’s private messaging system and no longer in its public spaces.
A paradigm shift. The arrival of Facebook in 2004 represented a big bang, transforming our online habits and establishing the era of social media. An era in which everyone, without any technical knowledge, could with one click publish a text, a photo, a video, to their friends. An era where we were inclined to indulge, encouraged by the race for likes, and where the definition of “friends” expanded to the point where we no longer needed to know them. On Twitter, they became “subscribers,” able to share and reshare our content with an unknown but growing audience. An era of rumors that the selfie generation then rushed into, on Instagram. Showing yourself, in photos or videos, has become a new form of language; Collect followers, comments, reaction emojis, a priesthood.
“Now I don’t publish anymore”
But the frenzy is losing steam. “Before I told my entire life on the Internet”says Sarah, 36, a saleswoman in the Rhône. “I shared a lot of photos publicly on Facebook. I wrote “I’m too lazy to go to class”, “I’m going to have a coffee”… It changed a lot. Now I don’t post anymore, I don’t use my real name, you can’t recognize me in my profile photo. Over time, I realized that posting could have repercussions on my professional life, that social media could be used to harass or exploit our data in harmful ways. »
Rayan Hermassi is not part of the same generation. But at the age of 19 he chose to uninstall all social networks from his phone, except for Snapchat. “While preparing for high school, I procrastinated too much. I would get home, I had things to do, I would go on TikTok and at one in the morning I would realize that I hadn’t done anything. » If he kept Snapchat it was mainly for his messages, a privileged and private place to exchange with his friends. Like most of them, he never posts anything publicly. “I don’t see the point, I don’t want to publish content that anyone can see. »
You have 80.37% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
