Cedars, April 2019

April 2019 10 OFF CAMPUS Millions of Millennials Move away from Facebook For many young people, social media is growing stale by Callahan Jones and Paolo Carrion B efore entering his freshman year at college, Ian Sarmiento deleted all of his social media accounts. “I realized that my social media use wasn’t healthy at all,” Sarmiento, a sophomore broadcasting major at Cedarville University, said. “It got to the point where I would try to tell someone a story and they would already know about it because I got tagged … on Facebook.” The choice to leave social media is not limited to just Sarmiento. Facebook itself is becoming less popular on a national level. Facebook is seeing its first decline in active users since its launch in 2004. According to Fast Company, a business magazine, teenagers don’t find Facebook “cool,” which may explain why an estimated one million teenagers are leaving the social media platform a year. This trend is not only among the youngest of users. Pew Research found Facebook usage among people 18- 29 years old has decreased from 88 to 81% from 2016 to 2018. Among all online adults, usage of Facebook has decreased from 79 to 68%. Adults who say they check Facebook at least weekly has risen, from 15 to 23%, while those who say they check the service multiple times a day has fallen from 55 to 51%. Dr. Robert Parr, a senior professor of sociology at Ce- darville, said the decrease in Facebook usage could simply be a symptom of weariness. “We live in a society where people grow tired of things,” he said. Parr also said it’s likely that young people want to do something different from their parents. They may not be in- terested in the information they’ll find on Facebook, which will largely be updates from the older generation. While he does not use social media himself, Parr has read about the subject as a sociology expert and hears about Facebook from his wife, who uses the platform fre- quently. “She says ‘there’s just a lot of junk and nonsense out there,’” Parr said. “You want to spend the least amount of time as possible getting to what you want. And if you have to sort through a bunch of stuff in which you’re not interested, then maybe there’s another platform … [where you don’t] have to sort through all that other stuff.” Nate Stahlnecker, a Cedarville computer engineering student, is also skeptical about the content on Facebook. While he does have an account, he rarely uses it. “After getting a [Facebook] account, I think I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t actually care all that much about what people had to say,” Stahlnecker said. Stahlnecker said he used the service most in late mid- dle school to early high school when he grew interested in politics. “I would do the occasional political rant or reply to someone who I found particularly ignorant,” he said. “And I don’t think that was particularly healthy.” Now Stahlnecker rarely uses Facebook. He does not have the Facebook app on his iPad, his primary mobile de- vice, and does not have accounts on other social media like Instagram or Snapchat. After high school, he deleted many of his “friends” from the platform. “I just didn’t feel the need to hear from them anymore,” he said. Stahlnecker, however, does use Messenger, Facebook’s instant messaging service, in lieu of texting. “I like to be able to talk to one person at a time,” Stahl- Photo courtesy of Ian Sarmiento Ian Sarmiento removed himself from all social media before starting college. Illustration by Katie Wingert