You change your profile picture on Facebook. Minutes later, you receive a notification. Your mom liked your new default. Horrified, you log off, hoping that none of your friends realize. Sound familiar?

This is just one example of many reasons why a majority of teenagers have stopped using Facebook as frequently as they used to. Stories of parents, uncles, aunts, and distant relatives liking and commenting on photos and statuses have become all too common, and teenagers see this as dispiriting and even embarrassing.

So, it really isn’t a coincidence that a May 2013 Pew Research Center report revealed an increase in the use of apps such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr between 2011 and 2012 while Facebook growth remained stagnant. Even more shocking, the largest demographic of Facebook users, according to onlinemba.org, is women ages forty-five and over!

The face of social media has evolved beyond Facebook’s original design, splintering into a number of services with specific goals. Instagram is a platform for people to quickly exchange photos, Twitter allows people to share quick bursts of commentary and thoughts that are short and easy to digest, and Tumblr is used to express personal interests and more involved reflections.

Facebook’s constant redesigns and in-your-face feature launches, like Timeline and Graph Search, just can’t compete with the fast and easy to use nature of its competitors.

Despite Facebook’s waning popularity, it is still a formidable internet presence with over 1.15 billion active users in June alone. Facebook began as a social network made by and for Harvard students. It slowly expanded to other universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Columbia.

By the time it opened registration to everyone, Facebook’s users consisted solely of college students and recent graduates, which helped create the “young adult” image that appealed to teenagers.

Unfortunately, this young adult image is not enough to retain its teen audience. Perhaps the most important reason for the decline of Facebook is that these new specialized platforms offer a greater degree of anonymity. Twitter, Snapchat, and Tumblr all allow pseudonyms instead of requiring personal information like your real name, making it easier to filter and choose who you can communicate with. The specialization of these websites makes it simpler to filter who you want to see what you post as well.
However, the ubiquity of Facebook will always be its most prominent and valuable feature.

“I don’t feel like Facebook will ever go away completely,” senior Gina Sanchez said. “It’s a good way for us to communicate with family members and friends who we don’t get a chance to see that often anymore.” It’s hard to predict the status of Facebook, or should we say, how many people will be making statuses on Facebook, in the next ten years.

But on the other hand, the real issue here may not be the popularity of social networking websites, but rather what teenagers want out of them. As a generation, us teenagers are always looking for the next best thing — something that will further distance us from our parents and keep up with our fast-paced lives, while still allowing us to look fashionable.

As such, social media will always have a huge presence in our lives; there’s no denying that fact. However, as we become more connected through technology, we’re actually becoming more disconnected with the real world. If we’re more cognizant of the effects of these websites and apps, perhaps we won’t have such large demands to fuel the developers of them.

So, you look down at your phone to see that your mom just learned how to add you on Snapchat. What are you going to do now?