Abstract
The business figures linked to the economy of big companies have shown that large technology platforms are some of the few major beneficiaries of the global economic crisis generated by COVID-19. The study compares biannual results of digital consumption and links user monitoring methods with the realization of qualitative focus groups. It analyses the evolution of the consumption of digital tools (mainly social media) by young university students in Spain between 2019 and 2021. The results of the comparative study show a 36% increase in the time spent using digital applications between the two years studied, as well as a greater concentration of time spent on a few platforms. The qualitative results indicate a self-declaration of addictive dependence on the use of social media; an increasing trend in declaring that youngsters have no interest in stopping their use of these platforms, and a justification that technology companies may not pay the user for the content and data they subsequently use to generate revenue in exchange for personal privacy. This behaviour describes the consolidation of the attention economy concept, which denotates a discursive appropriation of the university students who justify a part of the economic, social, and cultural domination that the technological giants carry out.
Highlights
Digital consumption has experienced a huge increase in Spain in the year of the pandemic, especially regarding the use of social media
For the scientific development of the concept of the attention economy, the study establishes the monitoring and calculation of mobile phone and social media time as the main measure to determine the attention devoted to the devices and social networks applications by the analysed users [12,33,45]
The 36% increase in mobile phone usage that emerges from the comparative analysis of the 2019 and 2021 results has been driven by the take-off of two main platforms—Twitch and TikTok
Summary
Digital consumption has experienced a huge increase in Spain in the year of the pandemic, especially regarding the use of social media. 2021-Spain prepared by We are Social and Hootsuite [1] In users of social media in the last year, as in 2020 there were 29 million, representing 62%. Spain has more than 42 million Internet users, or 91% of the population. Eighty percent of the Spanish population regularly use social media, which is well above the world average of 53%. The increase in digital and internet consumption has occurred all over the planet, social media users have increased in greater proportion. Active users in internet networks increased by 13%, with 490 million more people in the last year. The use of internet in the world reached 59.5% of the population, 7.3% more than in
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