Recently, the New York State University in the US initiated a programme called ‘NYU in real life’, to promote a student-led culture change of spending less time online and more in living life in person, and creating together a ‘collective effervescence’. Many others followed suit like the Yale University with its ‘Offline Oasis’, where students in a place full of sunlight and plants, hang out without screens.

The University of Alabama offers ‘Tech Free Thursdays’ at its students’ center, and the University of California at Berkeley opened a class on limiting technology use, which became very popular in no time. New global data from the Financial Times and GWI – collected from more than fifty countries – revealed that the social media usage that peaked in 2022, is now on a steady decline. The gradual retreat is led by teens and 20 youths with a 10 per cent cut back. FT pointed out that the withering away of ‘real-person social content’, and a deluge of AI-generated ‘slop’ feeds were the accelerants. The downward curve is more pronounced in Europe and other developed markets.

While North America stands out as the major exception with the U.S. and Canada continuing to have a climb of about 15 per cent higher consumption than Europe. However, there is a parallel behavioural wave of ‘digital minimalism’ that is taking hold on American campuses. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, about half of teens (48 per cent) spoke about how social media mostly casts negative effects on people of their age, and a significant margin of young adults (44 per cent) are now consciously reducing social media and smartphone usage. A 2024 report from the US National Center for Health Statistics, disclosed that about 41.6 per cent of college students have described anxiety as a top concern, and many of them feel that social media feeds evoke........

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