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Some of the Biggest Economies Aren't a Big User Of Social Media (axios.com)
From a report: Only 37 percent of Germans use social media, according to a new Pew survey, a surprising figure given the fact that Germany is the world's fourth-largest economy by GDP, according to the World Economic Forum. Similar patterns follow for Japan, France and Italy, ranked 3rd, 6th and 8th in largest economy by GDP.
I've been working with social media across Europe for the best part of the last 10 years (being German myself and working in London), and during that time, social media have generally been handled with a huge amount of skepticism in Germany. Private data protection and consumer protection are very important topics in German politics, and whenever Facebook overextends its reach, you can be sure to read about it in all the newspapers. Data privacy watchdogs have reprimanded Facebook on several occasions. Germany was, as far as I am aware, the first country to force Facebook to filter both fake news and hate speech. All of that is constantly making the news, and Facebook is pretty much "the" social network. Twitter has an entirely different problem - the German language tend to be far more complicated than English. What fits into 140 characters in English can easily reach 200 characters in German, and even then be very imprecise. Most Germans tend to use it as a glorified news feed, less as something interactive.
Social media - also known as mind hive CIA project
Speaking of which : notice how nearly all cited countries - Germany, France and Italy - are in Europe, and we European tend to be really serious about our privacy.
And Japan is similarly concerned with privacy and not intruding onto other people.
And that not only classical social networks (like Facebook).
That's also the case with chat systems. WhatsApp seems to be not as popular there are elsewhere in the world. You could find actually lots of german who prefere/have switched to other systems (basically : systems with more green checks on FSF's list)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A lot of these economies are also suffering from a aging workforce where the number of young people are not taking over the older employees jobs, because they are not enough of them to do so. This in the short term is good for a countries economy having a labor force filled with skilled workers who do not have much overhead with children, so they can use their money to buy things, and take risks that wouldn't be wise if you are younger and have a mortgage and car payments and are a couple months away from being broke without your job. These older people have their homes paid off, so they can spend of more stuff and take financial risks which normally will be rewarding.
However in the long term they will die out and not be able to replace the workforce, and if ignored for too long, that workforce that does come in, will not have any cross training from the previous generation and make the same mistakes over again.
We have been wasting time for generations, social media is the newest form, but how far away is it, from water cooler talk, or going out during lunch and getting a bit tipsy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What this tells us is that people in developed economies who are productive and satisfied with their lives do not have much desire to waste their time on "virtual existance" and other pursuits of vanity and persistent stimulation.
or be used as a product.
To paraphrase Warren Buffett (about suckers): Look around the economy. If you can't see the products, you are it.
Have gnu, will travel.