Social media in 2014: unsafe and boring?
I'm fed up of selfies. I'm fed up of belfies, humble brags and endless hashtags - and I hope you are too. As the year draws to an end, I find myself reflecting on social media fatigue, a year when nothing was too sublime, or indeed, ridiculous, enough to not warrant some form of digital outing.
Throughout 2014 we saw some admirable stabs at new networks. Ello, which gained enormous traction marketing itself as the anti-Facebook thanks to snarky rival Twitter, before sinking without a trace - free from adverts, and, it turns out, staying power.
The message is clear; we expect, and deserve, our networks to behave more responsibly with our personal information. Should inappropriate or private material be posted on them, we want faster response times, or more stringent checks to ensure such content never makes it onto people's timelines in the first place.
The ways in which we're using social media also changed. I've previously written about how Facebook was the single network to see a drop in active usage among its 16-24 year-olds users, while continuing to attract an average growth of around 90 million users each month. This is mainly because we're choosing to merely lurk on others' profiles, rather than actively engage by posting pictures and writing comments. A third of UK and US users even claimed to be bored by Facebook.
What this effectively boils down to is greater connectivity to each other = good, oversharing = bad. We prefer keeping in passive touch with each other, over aggressive engagement through baby pictures and endless LAD Bible shares.
Image-heavy sites Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram were the fastest-growing social networks, according to GlobalWebIndexs research, indicating another move away from text-based interaction and a sharper focus on stalking.
Businesses were also scrambling to try and harness the power of social media to spread their own messages, with varying degrees of success. Over the past year, brands have saturated platforms from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, by way of covert 'sponsored' advertorial-style posts.
This cynical mix of business in pleasure domains is another of the year's presiding themes. Alan Sugar's selection of Australian Mark Wright as his latest Apprentice spoke volumes about the confidence enterprise is placing in digital marketing - or, essentially the slightly soulless task of climbing the slippery pole of Google's search results. Plough money into SEO, and you too can compete with the giants.
So in 2015, I wish for greater social responsibility from our networks, and also for the brands to give us back our networks and leave us in peace. But I have a feeling that's not going to happen. There's no need to break the internet, just stop using it to break irrelevant news.
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Social media in 2014: unsafe and boring?