why the silent user is the big winner of social networks

A few years ago social networks were used as authentic repositories of information, with many publications throughout the day and maximum interaction. Nowadays it is not unusual to see Instagram profiles completely empty of posts and reserved only for stories or even on X people who publish absolutely nothing, but have a really old account. And it’s not that they are dead accounts, but that their owners are just “watching”.

A paradigm shift. The technology industry has been selling us the need to have a presence on social networks to participate in the collective trend and with the aim of staying behind. But for science, these people who just watch without participating are actually the most intelligent and have received the name ‘lurking’.

For a long time, this attitude was attributed to a lack of commitment, but the reality is that lukers We represent the vast majority of users on the Internet, who only prefer silent consumption without entering into controversies or commenting on anything at all. In this way, our opinions remain in our minds and are not materialized by putting an answer on X or a comment on YouTube on a video.

Why does it happen? Here a key study from Frontier in Psychology has analyzed the psychological mechanisms behind this technological retreat and points to four critical factors:

1. Seeing the lives of others generates pressure that inhibits the desire we may have to share our own life or our concerns.
2. Concern for privacy, since a publication can easily be misinterpreted without context and expose itself to unnecessary controversy.
3. The pressure to generate social interaction in the comment box of different platforms is something that can deplete our energy reserves.
4. There is an excess of interactive stimuli that causes the brain to not be able to process more.

Consumption without exposure. Not all those who remain silent do so for fear of entering into a controversy, but for many, it is a matter of efficiency. Here, according to a job from Computers in Human Behavior, the motivations for consuming content such as watching a tutorial on YouTube or reading a thread on X are totally different from those for participating.

Here the user seeks mere usefulness for their daily life, making reading comments help to contextualize a news item without having to enter the mire of discussion. In this way, the user feels that they are up to date with all the news that may surround them, but without having to type a single word.

The dark side. The problem is that these attitudes indicate that the level of toxicity on social networks is quite high, which is why this ‘defense mechanism’ is activated in which a user does not leave because they do not want to lose connection with the world, but they ‘turn off’ their microphone. In the end it is a selective withdrawal in which you continue to see what is happening, but the noise is not allowed to directly affect the user.

Images | freepik

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