People are using their free time constructively.
Social media and the internet is now the dominant means of communication and technology. The internet is the result of consumerism in the modern industrial world, as the world has become much more interactive, faster, streamlined, and easier for humans to live in, the internet has filled the time we would have used on other practical things. Human’s want to be engaged and interested in something and these Social media sites have created the perfect algorithm to maintain your attention. People stay on the internet, facebook and Instagram are over 10 years old and still growing because of the connectivity and the capability of social media apps to bring online communities closer. People once immersed themselves within the TV set. People before that immersed themselves in books and the natural, physical world. In our modern age, where there are less physical jobs for the unskilled or uneducated, people gravitate to the internet because they want to use their time towards something that they are passionate about or interested in. People tend to direct their energy online towards engaging with tasks, communities, and games online. This energy is fueled by one’s intrinsic motivation to consume, learn, and interact with the world around them and the internet. The intrinsic motivation to use your free time to consume, learn, and engage with exactly what you want to is uniquely a 21st century thing. We have realized as humans over the last 20–30 years that yes we love to consume but consuming mindlessly is a waste of lifetime, so we must consume with purpose and engage, interact, and cooperate around specific topics, hobbies, or activities. This engagement and the never ending amount of information on the internet is what gets people to stay and it is what has replaced old ways of engaging and consuming. People are learning and engaging online not for external rewards but for intrinsic motivation, or the joy of doing something for what it is. This is what Shirky identifies as the driving force behind the engagement on all of the social media sites, people engage because they like doing it for what it is. Shirky points out that with all the free time people have in this day and age, we can get lost in it and not realize that all of the time we spend consuming can be looked at differently, as a new resource — the buildup of internet surfing and comment section engagement, the cognitive surplus. And people aren’t viewing this as work, and theyre only motive behind these levels of consumption and interaction is that they want to use their freetime constructively to learn or look at what satisfies them. Intrinsic motivation to endlessly learn and interact is the motive behind people’s time spent on the internet.
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