Hello, my name is Frederick and my inquiry question is “Is social media good or bad for education?”
My first round of research involves finding how long and how many different types of people generally use social media and how much of their lives revolve around it.
I found that originally, around only 5% of people used social media platforms, but gradually over time, more and more people used it, rising up to 72% of the population in the USA in 2011.(1) I found that the types of people using social media were originally young adults, but eventually older users were more numerous.(1)
Here is a graph depicting the percent of people from a certain age group that uses social media (1):
This second graph shows how often they use the platforms(1):
We can see that the majority of people use social media daily and very little use it less frequently.
Currently, the global daily average in social media usage is 151 minutes, a slight step up compared to the 147 last year. This is, however, including many third world countries and countries that do not have much social media use. If we look at the USA, it shows that their citizens use on average 2 hours and 3 minutes of social media every day.(2)
With this information, we can tell that around ten percent of people’s daily lives revolve around social media, and around 1/8 of their day if we take out eight hours of sleep.(2) We can also see that 92.7% of people who can use social media, do use it.(3) Finally, on average, more females use social media than males do, around 30 more minutes in general.(4)
- https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabId=tab-81867c91-92ad-45b8-a964-a2a894f873ef
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/#:~:text=How%20much%20time%20do%20people,minutes%20in%20the%20previous%20year.
- https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/
- https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-statistics-for-social-media-managers/