Some of the Biggest Economies Aren't a Big User Of Social Media (axios.com) 78
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.
Social media - also known as mind hive CIA project (Score:1)
Look, not in every country it is good taste or accepted to propagate rumors or opinionate in 100 characters. Some cultures are more rational and this hive mind thing does not work. That someone opionates in first name does not make it less true than if published in some foreign country newspaper - at least that cognitive bias does not work everywhere.
Speaking of CIA project... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [eff.org])
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still make things in Germany (Score:1)
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Ok, we design things in California.
Often that design process is that a US company contacts a design company in Taiwan, which produces a bespoke design for which the real designer will not claim rights to. It's then "Designed in the USA", because someone in the US approved and paid for the design.
Germany will increase (Score:3, Interesting)
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Funny. There are not that many refugees. This is an artificially generated panic which serves to promote right-wing populists. Fortunately, in Germany they (AfD) are currently imploding, but other countries are not so lucky and the population anywhere always has a large faction that fall for the these people.
Why is this surprising? (Score:4, Interesting)
Gabbing, food-plate moneyshots, selfie-admiration and laughing at animals does not necessarily lead to productivity.
Privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
does not necessarily lead to productivity.
Though, as mentionned by TFA (sorry, I read it, here I'll turn in my /. member card) they are even more obsessed with their privacy, as a significant part of Europe is.
The other country are also European (Italy, France) or similarly obsessed with privacy and averse to intrusion (Japan).
Seems that the US is actually the anomaly, having a high GDP *but* happily providing all their personal information to be abused by marketeers/advertiser, by three-letter agencies, and by pirates leaking databases and personal photo collections.
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
I dunno if it is so much "happily provide", but likely last not, too uneducated, ill-informed, or ignorant of the fact that massive data even IS being collected on them, much less the implications of such massive data collection and analyzation can do the people and their privacy.
I'm guessing that sure, a lot of folks wouldn't care, but I would posit that the majority of the populace using social media even is NOT aware of the massive information collection going on, nor how it is used.
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I'm guessing that sure, a lot of folks wouldn't care, but I would posit that the majority of the populace using social media even is NOT aware of the massive information collection going on, nor how it is used.
I doubt the difference is awareness so much as caring. Germany, in particular, is extremely sensitive to privacy reasons. What's more interesting is why the populace of some countries care so much more than others. German motivations seem obvious... but Russians would seem to have almost as much motivation and they're heavy users of social media.
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Gabbing, food-plate moneyshots, selfie-admiration and laughing at animals does not necessarily lead to productivity.
You're implying a causal relationship, which is contradicted by the existence of many other high-performing economies -- including the most productive countries -- that do have heavy social media usage.
Re:Social media is a false economy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Maybe they don't need social media (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they have in-person communities and social interactions. We Americans are far more socially isolated from the people around us and geographically isolated from our long-term friends and family than most other countries I've visited.
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"We Americans are far more socially isolated from the people around us..."
Actually, I think that you've got it sideways.
If you read upon the history of American Cultures... Americans are Joiners. At one time they joined the Elks, and Kiwanis, and Odd Fellows and Masons. Colleges had Fraternities and Sororities, kids joined Scouting and 4H and Little League. Organized local Social interaction was the Norm.
Perhaps it was the result of the very rootlessness of American Society, where entire Families didn't sta
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The problem is that 1.4 million of them are either on life support or have been dead since 2014 and nobody's told them. They stay on Facebook so their grandchildren can find them.
Germany has a long history of data privacy concern (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Germany has a long history of data privacy conc (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Good point. All it takes is a few of those long German words, and they're already over the 140 limit.
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Aging population centers as well. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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FTFA:
Japan, Germany and Italy have some of the lowest levels of social media use, and they all have some of the world's oldest populations.
The US isn't far behind in old folks. In 2030, the baby boomers will be retired, retirees will outnumber workers, and two-thirds of the federal budget will got to Social Security/Medicare. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else. It's conceivable that we might have a decline in social media usage in the coming decades.
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Original Article (Score:3)
From pewresearch.org:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac... [pewresearch.org]
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Also important to note: in all of those countries English is a very strong second language, especially for the younger generations who get taught English from age 12 in The Netherlands (and it's lowering to 7 now). As for Sweden, "There is currently an ongoing debate among linguists whether English should be considered a foreign or second language in Sweden (and the other Scandinavian countries)[11] due to its widespread use in society. " - source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's not the only explanat
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Important to note that Sweden, Netherlands, and Australia
Also important to note: in all of those countries English is a very strong second language
I know it's hard to differentiate Australia from Austria, but please at least try.
This isn't surprising at all (Score:4, Insightful)
What we call "social media" is really young, and a huge recession took place during that time. You could snap your fingers, make FaceBook disappear, and the economy at large would not really feel it. Just 10 years ago, nobody was using this crap and things were just fine.
It is astonishing number! (Score:2)
Discount small children, very old people with failing eye sight and arthritic fingers, this is probably as large as it gets. In USA voter turn out struggles to reach 67% and cracks 60% only in presidential elections.
Germany (Score:4, Interesting)
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So what this says is... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Looks to me like a direct correlation between ... (Score:2)
From personal observation, I concur. My most educated acquaintances use it significantly less than the less well educated.
Perhaps we're hitting upon a core truth here !
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Ham radio license stats are also interesting. (Score:3)
Amateur radio licenses vs. population. [wikipedia.org] Apart Japan (where aged people represent most of the population - ham radio is mostly a hobby for old people), France, Germany, Italy and other industrialized countries show a negligible interest into ham radio. Together with the results described in TFA, one could argue that wasting time into social media isn't a good way to be productive.
Is there a lesson here? (Score:3)
Is there a lesson here? Maybe, use of Social Media impedes the economic growth?
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I'm not sure that's much of a lesson since there are plenty of other "biggest economies" that do use social media.
More likely, as many others have stated already, that its more to do with privacy concerns and just generally having cultures where "ME!ME!ME!" ego-stroking isn't considered proper never mind encouraged as it is in the US.
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The latter is not a factor at all. The Netherlands and Sweden are similar to Germany in that regard, but they score very high on social media use.
The original article shows that the groups that are most absent in social media use are the older ones. It seems that the middle-aged and elderly in most of the low scoring countries are just not as 'hip' as in countries such as the US, The Netherlands and Sweden.
BTW, note that the size of an economy is a retarded metric in this regard. GDP/capita would be more i
Gossip and bitching, (Score:1)
it has never contributed much to the human race. That does not change because of a new media. Social media boosts human stupidity and conformity while killing real discussion and creativity. It is harder to find thriving communities on the net today than it was ten years ago. Why? People do not go to the internet to exchange ideas and create. They go there to get confirmation of their value... Just like scientific method is designed to be an amplifier of the intellect; the social medias is designed as an am
Productivity is inversely correlated with facebook (Score:3)
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It's ironic that you leave your phone in airplane mode most of the time. Maybe you should get a cheap texting/calling phone for communication and get a tablet that can be tethered to it when you need connectivity?
Breaking news (Score:2)
Breaking news: people with jobs don't tweet every 14 seconds