The Buzz/Blog

It’s fair to say that we, the human race, have embraced social media wholeheartedly. It’s changed how we interact significantly, but it’s possible that we’re not taking enough time to step back and take stock of what’s happening.

It’s good timing then, that a former collaborator on the Brandwatch blog, Peter Kim, handed us an infographic all about the brain and social media, to see what kind of effect the digital revolution is having.

Here are some of the things in it that interested us most:

• There are over one billion people on Facebook and 555 million on Twitter.

• Facebook users spend an average of 405 minutes on the site each month, equating to 81 hours a year.

• Digital addiction is becoming a serious issue. Users supposedly rank it as harder to give up than smoking, drinking, spending money, sleeping and even sex!

• The infographic has a couple of suspect parts on brain and dopamine pathways, as well as implying that younger generations value social too highly. Well we think the neuroscience bits are a bit bogus, and perhaps the onus on younger generations should be shifted to the employers: workers consider digital freedom as an attractive perk of working for a company.

• Indeed, one third of under-30s say they value social media freedom over salary, and over half say they wouldn’t take a job that didn’t allow unrestricted social media access.

• The web brings out the narcissist in people, as though 30-40% of conversation taking place in the physical world is about themselves, people double it to 80% when conversing online. So, ‘social’ is a very self-centered place to be, it seems.

Well they were our highlights, there are a few other nuggets of information in the image beneath. Make of them what you will, but credit goes to Online College Courses for putting the infographic together.