A recent study done by Johnson and Wales University showed that 68% of the college students surveyed spent more than 6 hours a day with social media - mainly Facebook and Twitter. Coming from a large university (Go Hoosiers!), these results seem representative of what I typically observe. However, the majority of time isn’t spent posting updates about yourself, but rather checking in on others. For many of us that moved away from home for school, there’s an immediate disconnect between you and your life back home. Instead of spending the time to read through someone’s posts to figure out what they’ve been up to and where their lives have taken them, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. The majority of the time we spend on Facebook “creeping the book” is spent scanning through hundreds of images of our friends and family. Whenever a new special someone comes into the lives of a friend, you meet someone new, or have a new group member, the first thing we do is look through the pictures. With these photos, a story of that person’s life unfolds in just a few clicks.
Some studies state this time spent with social media is the cause for lower grades and too many distractions for college students today. However, for the majority of us time spent with social media pictures instantly connects us to everything we know. My generation, known as the millennial generation or Generation Y, grew up with social media, expecting to see the latest twitpic and upload of the day. We have spent most of our lives absorbed in the imagesphere and it is a trend that only continues to grow. The millennial generation is known as “the most visual of all learning cohorts. In general, visual learners predominate, but among Generation Y learners it is even more strongly preferred than in other age groups,” according to the Learning Resource Network. From the classroom to our daily lives, images dominate and direct our understanding and communication. So if you want to connect to us crazy millennials, reach out to where we are, the social sphere and imagesphere.
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