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Phase 1: Interview Results
The method of affinity diagram was used to group together individual ideas from the 8 interviews conducted, and to find out major trends in what people were saying. The major findings are outlined below:
People commonly talked about feeling worse after seeing photos of people do things more exciting than what they were doing. They also didn't like seeing people that posted too often. The most vocal interviewee talked about feeling like they "don't belong in this world where everyone is having fun".
People generally said that it would be 'forced', 'awkward', 'cringey', or perhaps even boring to start conversations with people they haven't spoken to in a long time. More often than not, the reason why people no longer talk to each other is because they have moved to different cities/countries/universities. One interviewee said that there wouldn't be much to talk about, while another said that these conversations don't start because no one takes the initiative.
One idea suggestion was that you can bring up old memories between two people to start up a conversation.
This was the most talked about 'favourite aspect' to social media. People are really curious about each other. The specifics types of activities people talked about ranged from stalking people that they don't actually know, to getting updates on friends, to using snapmaps to figure out precisely what their friends are doing.
People overwhelmingly talked about wasting far too much time on social media. They talked about Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat as being time consuming, addictive and time killers. One person said that they check social media every 10 minutes. Another person said that they had an app on their phone for monitoring their own social media usage (approximately 5 hours per day).
Behind stalking other people, talking to others was the second most talked about positive aspect to using social media.
People seemed to be fine with being unfriended by people that they don't interact with, but also feel about unfriending others. Only a single interviewee said they actively unfriended people. Overall, there is some social awkwardness about the concept of unfriending.
All except 2 interviewees said that they spend on Facebook and Instagram. The two exceptions were one person which used Instagram more than Facebook, and another that used Facebook only and did not have Instagram.
This number was generally between 10-30 people. There was one person that they kept in contact with 100 people.
Almost everyone mentioned being entertained by finding more about the world as a positive to use of social media. This could be news, current issues, new knowledge, food videos, events in a home country...
There were two interviewees who were very confident that the problem we're trying to solve is not caused by social media, but by the way in which people are viewing the content. They believe that the problem of social media depression should be solved by looking at its root cause, which would be depression.
A few people talked about using Facebook as a tool for finding out about social events, and managing them.
Interviewees largely talked about using social media on their phones. One interviewee said that the Facebook website is more suited for use on a laptop.
One interviewee noted that they used different apps for talking to different people. Another said that people from different countries may use different apps.
e.g. Line -> Japan, WhatsApp -> Hong Kong, WeChat -> China, Messenger -> Australia