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Have We Passed Peak Social Media?

2 months 3 weeks ago
Social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been on a steady decline since. An analysis of 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries by the digital audience insights company GWI found that adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024. That figure is down almost 10% from 2022. The decline is most pronounced among teenagers and people in their twenties. Usage has traced a smooth curve upward and then downward over the past decade. This is not simply the unwinding of increased screen time during pandemic lockdowns. The data also captured a shift in how people use these platforms. The share of people who report using social media to stay in touch with friends, express themselves or meet new people has fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Opening the apps reflexively to fill spare time has risen. North America is an exception to the global trend. Social media consumption there continues to climb. By 2024 it reached levels 15% higher than Europe. Meta and OpenAI recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos.

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Jeff Bezos Predicts Gigawatt Data Centers in Space Within Two Decades

2 months 3 weeks ago
Jeff Bezos told an audience on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next ten to twenty years. The Amazon founder said these orbital facilities would eventually outperform their terrestrial counterparts because space offers uninterrupted solar power around the clock. Bezos was speaking in a fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. He said the giant training clusters needed for AI would be better built in space because there are no clouds, rain or weather to interrupt power generation. Bezos predicted that space-based data centers would beat the cost of Earth-based ones within a couple of decades. He described the shift as part of a broader pattern that has already occurred with weather satellites and communication satellites. The next steps would be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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