Perhaps the answer is they were never there. For more than one half of the world's population - every culture, every age, gender, nationality, occupation - to be actively involved in social media beggars belief. Most people, the majority of the world's populations, are too time-poor just making ends meet to worry about how they're appearing to other people.

The search for 'where are the social media users going?' returned only marketing strategies and bolstered data figures that scream insecurity on the part of the advertising industry and its victims. More to the point, when obeying that oldest adage (follow the money) it becomes an interesting intellectual exercise to look at what marketing companies and their ilk are claiming in terms of numbers in social media users (which, so far as I can see, cannot be so easily measured, given that so many take pride in their multiple sock puppet accounts) to the extent that Chicken Little's hysterical search for a falling sky seems rational in comparison.

It's easy to spread misinformation on this instantaneous, unverifiable, global platform that prefers screamed melodrama to rational debate. How can you check to see how many there were and how many there are?