Tim Challies provides a remarkable statistic and a sobering reflection:
Seven hundred billion minutes. That’s how much time Facebook’s 500 million active users spend on the site every month. 700,000,000,000 minutes. Let that one sink in for a moment. Every month we spend the equivalent of 1.3 million years on Facebook; the equivalent of nearly 18,000 lifetimes. More than half of us login every single day; we average 130 friends. And we spend vast amounts of time on there.
Facebook now offers 900 million different objects or pages for us to interact with—groups, events, community pages, and so on. We upload over 3 billion photographs every month (which means we’re uploading millions every hour).
[. . .]
So think about this one. Four years ago most of us did not use Facebook at all. And today we are using it compulsively. A recent study of media habits found that about 1/3 of women between 18 and 34 check Facebook before they even go to the bathroom in the morning; 21% check it in the middle of the night; half of them admit that they are addicted to it. Meanwhile the older generations, those in their 40’s and 50’s, are also migrating to social media; they now represent the fastest-growing population.
But again, 4 years ago most of us did not use it at all. We may have heard the name, but it was just a name. Today it’s a way of life. What’s important to think about is the fact that Facebook is not a site that offers us a better way of doing what we were already doing. It’s not like most of us were on another social media site and we then migrated once Facebook came along (with young people being a possible exception; many of them migrated from MySpace to Facebook). For the majority of us, Facebook is a new thing. Those 700 billion minutes are not minutes that we’ve taken away from other online pursuits. They are minutes that we’ve taken away from real life.
November 23rd, 2010 | 10:35 am
While I must acknowledge that I pretty much loathe Facebook, it’s the primary way I get to see my niece’s twin daughters growing up. It is not altogether worthless. And it’s quite possible to waste time in “real life.” In order to really make the case against Facebook, it would be necessary to demonstrate that those 700 billion online moments would have been used productively on “real life” endeavors had they not been used on Facebook. Had they been spent, say, watching the least objectionable program on television to kill time, I would say Facebook might be preferable.
November 23rd, 2010 | 11:00 am
I’m up to level 61 on FarmVille.
November 23rd, 2010 | 11:38 am
Fortunately, I’m not a compulsive user (my compulsion is firing up the laptop every morning to get the current local temperature), but I have found FB a good way to connect with younger relatives–the Gen X’ers and Millennials, as well as staying in touch with my Baby Boomer cousins and friends.
For me personally, it doesn’t cut into face-to-face conversation time, but I am concerned about the decreasing lack of eye contact in everyday interactions.
November 23rd, 2010 | 11:45 am
I think that, if a given user chooses to, Facebook can be used to supplement “real life” in ways that we weren’t able to before, as David Nickol mentioned above, seeing pictures that would never have been sent via email, let alone snail mail. It can also let people know of the things happening in our lives that are a level or two above mundane, so when we do meet those people face-to-face, or even over the phone, there’s less small talk to wade through. I can have deeper face-to-face conversations, more quickly, because I and my friend use Facebook. :-)
November 23rd, 2010 | 1:06 pm
So I can, like, like this, if I, like, want to, on, like, Facebook?
Hello, my name is Joe Knippenberg and I’ve been off Facebook for almost a year now. I prefer “old fashioned” email to “facebooking.” And I leave it to my wife to keep up with those of our acquaintances who only communicate by that means. It’s one of the many sacrifices she makes for our family.
November 23rd, 2010 | 3:59 pm
Ed Snyder has made my day!
November 23rd, 2010 | 10:05 pm
It’s funny that so much of the news on people spending time in cyberspace is considered unproductive. As somebody in the industry, we spend our careers competing for human attention. So for us this is all great news. Think about it from our perspective: time spent in cyberspace is essentially time spent reading and writing – well, even in it’s more primitive forms it is intellective work. It is time spent NOT driving cars. It is time spent NOT in dangerous streets where there might be crime. It is time spent not employing toxic chemicals, or risking physical injury. It is time spent using less and less energy as systems become more efficient.
November 24th, 2010 | 10:51 am
I wonder whether there was backlash over the first newspapers, or the Pony Express, or Bell’s handy-dandy invention, the telephone. Or books. “Agnes, dear, it’s so awful; Papa won’t ever put down that newspaper and talk to us! And Judith, she just sits all day scratchin’ away, writin’ that miserable dandy of hers, or readin’ all his nasty letters. Whatever can we do? *sigh!*”
When I was a kid, all I ever heard was how children were wasting their lives on the telephone. Or was it the television?
Media are what people use to stay in touch and learn about their world. Such interest can either be healthy or not, or a mix of both, as can ways of pursuing it. It might be more profitable to focus on what constitutes healthy interaction and learning, rather than on the modes themselves, which are not so much the problem as their misuse.
November 26th, 2010 | 4:46 am
[...] HT: Joe Carter [...]
November 29th, 2010 | 3:53 pm
700 billion minutes a month divided by 500 million users only works out to just over 45 minutes a day per user. That’s not really all that alarming, especially, if, as another commenter suggested, the time would’ve been wasted on TV anyway.
Also, I think the statistic greatly exaggerates the actual amount of use. For example, I’ll often sign in for one specific thing (e.g. to send a message to a few friends or to post a picture) and then leave it open in while I work on something else in another window. Thus, I might be logged in for several hours, but I’m only actually doing anything with it for about 5 minutes. I know I’m not the only person who does this. My wife leaves it open all night while she’s asleep so she doesn’t have to reboot the computer and log-in again the next day. She might be logged in for literally days at a time, but only actually spend 15-20 minutes on it.
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