Hello everyone in this chat: Why messengers will kill social networks
alexander savina
Social networks are usually blamed forthat they distract us from the "really important" things, interfere with productivity and develop clip thinking. But the reality is that they are an integral part of our life and few can completely disconnect from them today. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the way we use social networks does not change at all.
It's not even that Snapchat is considered an application for teenagers, and Facebook is a social network for an “adult” audience. Perhaps, messengers sometime in principle will bypass social networks in popularity - and instead of long posts we will throw exclusively personal messages to each other. This idea is supported by statistics: in 2016, Business Insider published a report in which it said that the four most popular messengers (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat and Viber) overtook four of the most popular social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn) by the number of active users in month. In the same 2016, the number of WhatsApp users reached a billion, and last summer there were even more of them: according to the company, a billion people use the application daily, and the total number of users who resort to the application every month increased to 1.3 billion. For comparison, last year Facebook crossed the mark of two billion active users per month, and Instagram has more than 700 million.
The ability to share personal messages add and many "traditional" social networks - even those who did not think to correspond in them directly, such as Instagram. 41% of those surveyed for the GlobalWebIndex report say that they need social networks in the first place in order to observe what their friends are doing - and 33% say they use them for the most diverse communication. But most of all, of course, the trend is noticeable on Facebook, which highlighted the messenger in a separate application. Of course, one cannot explain this only by the love of users for personal communication (after all, two applications provide more opportunities for monetization), but company representatives point out that they consider Messenger very important. According to the social network, in 2017, 260 million new correspondence appeared daily in the messenger, and users posted new messages in more than seven billion chats every day.
More and more people are more attentive to buying clothes and are thinking about the impact of consumer habits on the environment - so why not adhere to the same principle of awareness and in communication?
“Now the age of instant messengers has definitely come,” said David Marcus, former president of PayPal, when he first came to develop the Messenger application. “This is what people most often do on a smartphone. Some were surprised that I switched to Facebook, but I did because I believe that the messengers have a future. The time spent on the social network, the attention of users, their involvement - all this happens there. And the opportunity to build a system for this is given once a generation. " "We think that people write messages more often than they directly sit on social networks," said Mark Zuckerberg, when the application was just launched.
The fact that sometimes we want to go from one-to-one news feeds is not surprising: we spend two hours and fifteen minutes daily on social networks, and it’s scary to think about the enormous flow of information we have in this time. According to a Domo survey, Americans use more than three million gigabytes of Internet data every minute — for example, more than forty-nine thousand photos, almost thirteen million tweets and more than two million snaps appear every minute. It is not surprising that many people feel that they are overloaded with information - this is one of the frequent reasons why people leave social networks in principle. “Instead of posts of my friends, I see only articles that they like, and their comments that are of no interest to me,” says 17-year-old Englishman George Lincoln, who refused to facebook. “I want to pay attention to more useful things, and this is very distracting. I I'm not worried that I can miss something, because I still use Messenger for communication. "
This approach can be understood: in chat rooms it is easier to control what information we receive and in what quantity. You can choose from whom exactly we receive messages, and correspondence, which is too distracting from business, with a clear conscience, sweep up (and, if desired, open, only when the urgent need arises). In a large news feed, it is difficult to catch something valuable (or something valuable for you — it also happens that friends are interested in a question or text that you wouldn’t pay attention to in a normal situation). In the large stream it is difficult to understand what to focus on and who to trust - it seems that important information is at the same time everywhere, and nowhere else - and you have to look for exactly whose expertise we trust. One-on-one chats and correspondence provide this level of trust - we know who we are talking to and what to expect. At the same time, they make communication more personal and intimate - these are not posts designed to be read by everyone, from colleagues to distant relatives, but by a message or photo intended only for your eyes or at least for a narrow circle of acquaintances.
Moreover, such a position fits well with the course of awareness in everything. We hear more and more that for life we need far fewer things than we already have and what advertising insists. More and more people are happily beginning to follow the principles of Marie Kondo, are more attentive to buying clothes and are thinking about the impact of consumer habits on the environment - so why not stick to the same principle of awareness and in communication? At first, social networks attracted many people with the opportunity to talk again with those with whom we lost contact (think about the meaning of names like Odnoklassniki or VKontakte). But is this feature important to us today? Yes, in social networks we can watch almost anyone we want, and even completely strangers. But how often do we really need this whole large circle of contacts? Has the number of friends in social networks lost its previous meaning? Do we really want to keep track of the details of the life of classmates with whom we last met ten years ago and are not going to do this in the near future? Do we want to tell them about what is happening with us? You can shorten the list of friends, you can unsubscribe from updates of those who are not interested in us, you can change the privacy settings - or you can go from posts to chats with the closest.
Most of the messages are likely to remain buried in the depths of the chat - which means you can not worry if the wording is sufficiently clever, how accurate the frame is and how many likes they collect
Like the format of storis, invented by Snapchat, messengers very accurately reflect the main feature of all communication on the Internet: everything is fleeting. A huge layer of information that we create daily, sooner or later will disappear from our field of vision: it is unlikely that you regularly review everything that you previously wrote on your page, or often return to your old friends' records. The easiest way to compare the social network with a photo album: you carefully select and think through what to show and in what sequence, and whether there is a frame or an idea to save them. This is good in its own way (in the end, the "front" page about yourself sometimes needs to be no less than casual communication), but it is difficult to limit ourselves to just this in the modern world. With messengers, as with the format of storiz, everything is much easier. Most of the messages are likely to remain buried in the depths of the chat - which means you can not worry if the language is clever enough, how accurate the frame is and how many likes they collect, but instead just relax and enjoy communication.
Of course, it is difficult to equate minimalism, awareness and communication in messengers - almost everyone has been buried at least once under a ton of new messages because friends once again argued about something lively during working hours, and there is no less informational noise. But, like any tool, they give us the opportunity to think about what is really interesting and important for us. This, of course, does not mean that you should immediately leave social networks and move to instant messengers. But the reason to think about where you will find out more about your friends - in correspondence or from the news feed - and there really is.
Photo: sayid - stock.adobe.com, paramouse - stock.adobe.com