Social Media survives on people living and announcing loudly their lives on all the different platforms for that is the content that people log in for. The whole thing relies on people announcing the good and the bad thats going on in their lives for the amusement and bemusement of others, which is ok for kids who have little concept of privacy or need for it but as you age privacy becomes more important and making all your decisions and whereabouts public becomes more expensive (employers, family, people whose opinion matters) e.g. partying pics, too many selfies, regular bar check-ins, drunken status updates they can come back to haunt you.
Now there are those who would argue that in todays age even bad behaviour is acceptable and quite de rigueur if you want to stand out from the clutter. This is suitable for celebrities and reality TV stars but for working professionals it can be the death knell.
Already we are seeing a tapering off from social media usage because of perceived fallout and user burnout. Not everyone is reliving their partying days (or nights) as vociferously as they were before as a result of the reality that your employer might have access to the same information. Does this mean social media is close to its saturation point?
Naysayers would argue that Humans are social creatures and will always need to communicate and socialize, this is a given but the preferred medium for distributing a message is constantly changing and forever fluid. Once it was vocal traditions, then a written tradition and now a digital written/audio/video tradition but just as those platforms have outlived their purpose so must this.
So no doubt that social media has a saturation point, the big question is when will it come and will it be a sudden (a new platform) or gradual (slowly losing members and fading out) decline.
Social media biggest plus (it’s global reach) is also it’s biggest flaw (privacy is lacking).
The old adage : keep your cards close to your chest flies in the face of active social media participation and hence might be it’s achilles heel.
As if to prove me right – this article is in todays Nytimes – http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-gpa-then-they-saw-your-tweets.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0#!