Social media survey responses from those closest to me

By Amanda Sebastiano

I found 10 friends, seven boys and three girls to take this survey. The males were mostly between the ages of 18 and 25, with one in his mid 30's. The females were all between 20 and 23.

 

All of the respondents say that their SM sites of choice are Facebook and Twitter, with only one participant still using MySpace. Three out of the seven males interviewed did mention previously using MySpace and recently switching over to Facebook within the last year.

They've been "liking" and "tweeting" for the past 5 to 10 years, even though 9 of the 10 claim to only spend between 5 to 20 minutes per day on these sites.

That's not much time.

One extreme outsider to the time spent on facebook question was one of the males, age 24, that says he spends "nearly 15 hours a day on facebook." He works for a cell phone company and has internet access on his phone making it all the more tempting to play around on the net for hours on end.

Every participant says that they multitask while on SM sites, and all but three say to use them while at work. Interesting. I wish I had a job where I was able to "like" someones post or tweet about how bored I am. I found that to be particularly interesting that less than half of the people asked go online when they're at home. An even better question would have been to ask if they use these sites while driving? Maybe we don't want to know the answer to that, actually.

All 10 respondents say they use Social Networking sites to keep in contact with not their close friends, but with acquaintances they've lost touch with over the years.

Everyone asked also said that although SM hasn't changed their lives in any significant way, it has helped them develop new relationships and skills. That counts as changing your life in a significant way, doesn't it?

One of the responses says that using sites like Facebook and Twitter help her "type like a madman!" Learning to type faster and more accurately are definitely substantial changes, I would say.

All 10 of the responses I received says that they use SM for finding and making friends, with one respondent saying that she discovered music and movies she never would have known about without seeing their facebook pages.

Although most of the feedback was positive, there were an array of reasons why this group thinks that Social Networking can be negative as well. Only two, both male, said that they don't see any downsides to using these sights. Three of the others said that they feel their privacy is sometimes in jeopardy and two others said that cyber bullying could be a bad effect of this medium as well. The last two said that they feel "the world has disconnected itself from a lot of human experiences by sitting on their computer," which I thought was interesting considering the discussion we had last week about people creating these alternative lives online. Has real-life gotten so miserable for some that they have to live through their monitors?

It seemed that over-all, the group I surveyed has a positive outlook on Social Networking and use it fairly often. They use it primarily while they're supposed to be working, and to connect with people that they don't get to see/talk to as much as they'd like. Lack of privacy and loss of interaction with other humans are the main downfalls to this new wave that has millions all over the world tweeting.