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Emma Charlton at the World Economic Forum summarizes a report that finds by cutting out three 10-minute social media checks a day you could read as many as 30 more books a year.
"Just a couple of five-minute breaks every hour are hundreds of hours yearly," the Omni Calculator's creators say. "You cut your social media time by half, and you still get plenty of time to read, run or earn money."
It recommends turning off push notifications that appear on your screen, deleting some apps, calling your friends rather than messaging them, and taking short holidays from all social media once in a while.
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How Many Extra Books Could You Read If You Quit Social Media?
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday August 19 2019, @02:24PM
Citation needed.
I've just spent several minutes browsing for stats, and I don't see anything close to those numbers. It's true that older folks tend to be on social media less. Maybe your claim about 75% of the population would be true of users 65+ years of age, but even then I don't know -- as it's becoming more common for retired folks to use social media to "keep in touch" with the world. And although I couldn't find stats to verify this, I suspect that older folks tend to use social media differently from younger folks. That is -- a retired person is probably more likely to log into Facebook in the morning while having coffee and spend 15 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour browsing the news of the day, like they'd read a newspaper or look at obituaries and various other things retired people do. So they wouldn't be saving "five minutes per week" if they gave it up -- they'd likely be gaining larger chunks of time every day. Of course, I'm not sure older folks even should give it up: I think it may actually have a positive effect on keeping them "connected" for some older folks.
For younger people who seem to have some sort of weird tic that requires them to check their phone every minute or two, I agree that a lot of the regained time may be in small chunks that have fewer potential uses, but even 5-10 minute chunks of downtime can be used productively. Maybe not for reading, but for other activities (as I posted about above).
I'd imagine Gen X users are somewhere in the middle. Although I've met Gen X folks who seem tied to their phone now, most still seem to have an attention span and can actually carry on a conversation for a while without looking to a phone. I suspect many of them are closer to the retiree style of social media use: rather than sporadic chunks intermittently throughout the day, they have a longer span or two where they read stuff for a while.
I just spent about 10 minutes trying to find stats on median internet use, rather than mean/average, but Google and other search engines seem to love to turn "median" into "social media" in any search, so it's a pain in the neck to find anything -- but I did see one stat that said median social media use per day was now over 1 hour/day. (Even though stats typically say average is over 2 hours/day now.) Unfortunately, I couldn't find details of that median stat, so I'm sure of it. I wish I could find some better median stats, rather than "averages" which are available everywhere.
Regardless, I highly doubt your 75% five minutes/week claim when the median usage is supposedly now over an hour/day. Even if that were only true of social media users, since 80% of the U.S. population now has at least one social media profile, it's highly doubtful that 75% of people could only save 5 minutes/week.
My guess is that it's specific to YOU and the type of friends you like. I find that increasing numbers of my friends are disengaged from social media too (if they were ever active). But that's because the people I like to hang out with are often self-reflective folks who prefer to sit around thinking, rather than reflexively checking their phone to see what some idiot has posted two minutes ago. However, I think you're extending your perception of your friends and people you know to the overall population, and I don't think that works here. MOST people are now active on social media to some extent. And of those who are active, MOST spend a LOT of time on it (or at least more than a few minutes per week -- one stat to show this which I did find is that 74% of U.S. adults in 2019 say they have a Facebook account, and of those 51% say they use Facebook multiple times per day, while 74% use it at least once/day... and that's just for Facebook alone).