Familiar with the Kit Kat Jingle – “Gimme a break, gimme a break. Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar.” Kit Kat and Nestle are offering a break that surpasses a simple candy bar in the form of an app (of all things) to alleviate social media stress.
the Social Break app is designed for the overly stressed crowd who feels that they need to keep up with their social networking sites, but just need a break from it all. From reading a recent Chicago Tribune article, it appears that keeping up with social media, especially for the younger crowd, can be time consuming and just plain stressful. This problem is growing in Asia, where social media is most heavily used. The article explains their research:
JWT surveyed 900 19-26 year olds in China, Singapore and the United States and found that more than half considered it too time-consuming to keep up with all their social media commitments and conceded that the time they spent on such sites had a negative impact on their job or studies.
JWT says that their survey shows that young people feel under increasing pressure to maintain their social media connections, responding to friends’ requests to comment on or “like” their posts, photographs or other updates.
Nearly two thirds of Chinese surveyed said they felt pressure to be in constant contact on social media, with 58 percent saying their social media obligations caused them stress.
So, how does this work? As explained on the app’s site, users can set it up to automatically post on the bigger social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn- with automatically generated responses when someone tags you in a photo, comments on your wall, or shares a story on LinkedIn. This way, you can still interact with friends and colleagues while walking away from it all.
I realize this is a tongue in cheek app and meant not so seriously, but honestly, I think if we’re getting to a point where we need to automatically reply to people just to keep up, especially with automatically generated, canned responses, is it too much?
I know that personally there are times when I turn off the computer and phone just to get away from it for a day or two, but I really don’t think my silence is causing my friends and family to panic. I’m sure they may (or may not) notice my silence, but it’s not going to cause a widespread panic or change their view of me if I’m not responding right away.
I feel for the younger generation if they really feel stressed by interacting with friends in social media; it may signal a sign of the times, or a precursor to a time when social media will hit its peak and then die off in a similar fashion to the dot com bust. While I don’t think that will necessarily happen, I do wonder if at some point in the future people will go into social media overload, if they haven’t already.
