Are you spending less time scrolling on your phone? I am. And it isn’t because of a particular decision I’ve made. It’s being made for me. My inner self is rebelling about being permanently reachable, permanently informed, and permanently nudged by a thousand little voices that all insist they matter.
I’m not alone. People aren’t just overwhelmed by the outrage cycles, the influencer confessions, the algorithmic crap that passes for news. They’re saturated.
Proof? You can see it in screen‑time analytics, social‑media engagement data, and self‑reported behaviour in large‑scale surveys. Device‑level tracking from firms like DataReportal and App Annie shows that daily screen time in Europe and North America peaked around 2021–22 and has since flattened or dipped, especially among younger users. Meta, TikTok, and Snap all report shorter session lengths and lower engagement per user, with more people lurking rather than actively posting. People surveyed by Pew, Gallup, and Ofcom increasingly describe social media as exhausting, overwhelming, or too noisy, and a growing share say they’ve turned off notifications, reduced posting, or deliberately limited their availability.
So is this legacy media’s moment?
The bad news first: Growing internet fatigue may never translate into a mass return to traditional media outlets. Surveys from Pew, Gallup, and Ofcom find that trust in them remains low. Still, whenever major news breaks, consumers turn from their social platforms and influencers to media that have fact-checkers and a sense of proportion.
It’s a more modest role than in the heyday of big network supremacy. Yet, it’s one that trad media decision-makers, like Cesar Conde, hope to expand into a greater audience as fatigue with internet slop grows.
“We’re playing the long game,” Conde, who heads CBS’s news unit, told The New York Times recently. “We want to make sure that when audiences become too overwhelmed by the ecosystem of endless content, they know that there is a place where they can come that has the most trusted brands, that has the more trusted journalism, that will help them clearly understand what’s at stake.”
Crossing my fingers.
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