Zoom Life, Digital Senior Citizens and TikTok – our screens reflect a year of new problems and new solutions

This week, the 2020 edition of “The Swedes and the Internet” was released. Like many others, we followed the superb presentation live and wanted to share some of our reflections on the findings with you. This year's report was, of course, particularly interesting since the pandemic has led to dramatic changes in our digital everyday life in such a short time. We proceed into a new year with a lot of changed behaviours and new opportunities that will affect how we work with PR.

Home office

We’ll begin our reflection with the group that we belong to ourselves, the homeworkers of the pandemic. This change, and a fusion between work and personal, was likely one that we’ll remember very clearly. But it’s particularly important, for anyone who works with communication towards many different target groups, to remember that far from everyone has had the opportunity to work from home. This will have impact on our references and associations with this time. The ones who’ve had the opportunity to work from home partly or entirely are white-collars, high earners and those with children living at home. This group can be divided into two groups; those who had experience of working from home before and those who never worked from home before the pandemic. Among the experienced ones, 98% want to continue working from home, while 19% of the new home workers don’t want to do this at all. However, the vast majority want to be able to combine the two in the future, and all indications are pointing towards a new way of working where this will be possible. This puts new demands on meetings and interaction, something we’re excited to explore not only in our own worklife but also when creating events and experiences with and for clients.

The digital meeting

The report shows that we’ve adjusted to the new situations quite quickly and efficiently. We can therefore already identify where the new normals have led to innovation and progress, but also where our digital tools are insufficient. For example, many share the experience that most digital meetings are good, but that creative meetings and team building have been more difficult. Industries like ours really need to take advantage of all the good tools available and share the experiences and lessons learned. As we know, it was not only work-related meetings that took place via Zoom but also weddings, baptisms, funerals and soon also family Christmases. Digital meetings have become part of our everyday life and will be an important area to further explore next year. For our children it’s now completely natural to socialize like this, and we expect that our new digital socialization will be visible in popular culture.

Internet and digital services helped us through the year

Digital services and platforms and the internet have been of great importance for our ability to handle the various challenges throughout the year. Through the screens we’ve been able to keep in touch with each other, work, receive updates about the corona status and new guidelines, order antibody tests, medicine and home deliveries, buy food, cancel plans, etc. Not surprisingly, e-commerce increased. We now shop both more and more often online, and those who have really ventured into online shopping and socializing are our senior citizens. Food and health are the big online shopping categories, which makes us think of other reports showing that many don’t find the food stores’ digital experience particularly interesting. There is great potential for improvement here and we look forward to such projects. Culture is another area that is highlighted in the report where we see inspiring challenges to explore. It is clear that most of us miss physical cultural experiences and we haven’t really switched to digital versions to a large extent. There is definitely plenty for creative industries to do here.

Social media - historical increase for TikTok

89% of Swedes use social media every day and all channels are increasing. Facebook is still the largest player but the biggest increase of users is Instagram’s 71%. An interesting development here is that Instagram's DM has become a new main player on the chat scene. The big sensation when it comes to social media is TikTok. TikTok has the largest increase ever noted in the report's history. In one year, the use among 12-15-year-olds has gone from 28% to 71%, which also shows how quickly our youngsters embrace new trends. Another interesting player is Twitch, a gaming streaming service where you watch others play. A couple of years ago, Twitch wasn’t on many people's minds, but now it’s a platform used by 37% of all between 16 and 35. It was also used to attract new voters during the recent US election.

More than ever before, our digital behavior reflects the time we live in and also helps us deal with it. Our reflections on the report from the Swedish Internet Foundation are therefore also more general thoughts on this strange year that we’ll soon leave behind us. One thing that’s made the year so unusual, is that we’ve united globally in a common challenge that we’ve handled in the same or similar way to a fairly large extent. We can talk to a friend on the other side of the world about strange Zoom moments and understand each other. Suddenly the difference between our interaction with a friend in Nyköping and one in New York isn’t that big. We have also spent time with them in the same way that we have spent time with Grandma. We don’t cancel meetings if someone can’t participate physically and with that the whole world came a little closer. We’ve saved lives by not hugging each other but, perhaps also by being there on the chat when the anxiety became too stressful. A lot has happened this year, and what’s been going on on our screens is an accurate portrayal of the times we live, our challenges and our solutions.

We'd like to thank the Swedish Internet Foundation, not only for an ambitious survey, but for reminding us of the positive development that has taken place during this challenging time. We also want to send a special greeting to all our customers that we’ve gone through this year with: it has been a different journey and we admire you for how you’ve handled it by enabling quick changes and new solutions in your collaboration with us! To be continued.

Click here for the full report: https://svenskarnaochinternet.se/rapporter/svenskarna-och-internet-2020/