Last night in class, I turned the room around for one of my favorite parts of the semester, our focus group class. Every year, instead of standing up front droning on, I spend a session asking my students about their digital lives – and every year, I learn something new.
When I started teaching in 2014, I was quite a bit closer in age to my students than I am now. I could reference AIM and MySpace, and most of them would have some sort of lived experience with those things. But now, I find myself leaning on these students more and more as I march further and further away from their coveted 18-24 demographic. This class is helpful for them, but it’s really helpful for me.
I learned that we’re still in an extended weird period for social media and the rest of our digital lives around it. More than 40% of the class spends over 6 hours on their phones daily – but hands shot up across the room when I asked if anybody recently deleted a social app. The two most common changes they want to make to their digital habits are to, somewhat contradictorily, spend less time doomscrolling and create more content.
Below, read through some of my notes from last night’s discussion and the survey I sent beforehand. And of course, remember that this is very much not scientific or representative – this was a room of about 30 students, nearly all 20-22 years old, all living in or around New York City, and all marketing majors. If you’re interested, check out some previous write-ups here, here, and here.
- TikTok is in the driver’s seat. Last year, 18.5% of the class said it was their favorite platform – and this year, the number is 52%. Rating their sentiment 1-5, with 5 being the most positive, not a single student gave it a 1 or a 2.
- However, this was the first survey that 100% of students said they regularly use Instagram. It’s always been high in these focus groups, but this is the first time everybody was on it.
- Nobody uses Clubhouse, Swarm, Medium, GroupMe, or Nextdoor.
- LinkedIn is seen as necessary but cringey. These are college seniors applying for jobs, so they nearly all use it.
- Planning a party? Maybe Partiful, maybe Evite. Yes, the same Evite that was founded in 1998.
- If they meet somebody cute at that party and they want to ask them out, they are most likely to get that person’s phone number. Some would ask for their Instagram handle. Everybody laughed when I asked about getting their email.
- The only currently airing broadcast television show that anybody in the room could name was Abbott Elementary.
- For maybe the first time, we had a sizable number of students who expressed hesitancy about creating content because they don’t want to be canceled. One student makes content about their cat to avoid putting themselves out there.
- That being said, a majority of the class wished to create more content. 31% of the class never posts anything, and just one student said they posted multiple times a day.
- Speaking of one student, there was just a singular person who posted on Facebook in the past week.
- Once again, Snapchat was the weirdest platform. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. Some people just used it to keep their streaks alive.
- Somebody said that they used to use BeReal “way back in high school” when it was all the rage.
- 44% of the class has a finsta. 22% didn’t know what that is.
- Nearly everybody uses WhatsApp – but most just for class groups. Students said their friends at other schools use Discord or another platform more often.
- Some students still loved Twitter, and some said it feels worse than it used to. A handful have tried Threads. They’ve largely heard about Bluesky, but they’re not really familiar with it yet.
- Like nearly every semester, a small handful of students absolutely love Pinterest. Several said this was the app that makes them happiest.
- Beyond social, other apps that made people happy: NYT Games, Spotify, Messages, and Peacock.
- If given $10k to invest in a platform to be successful in 5 years: 55% chose TikTok, 22% chose Instagram.
- If given $10k to bet against a platform in the same time period: 30% chose Facebook, 18.5% chose Snapchat.
