Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have not made us worse at communicating but have changed how and where we communicate.
Social media in moderation can actually improve our lives and give us more contact with the people that are around us.
Facebook, for instance, has a mission which states that the company wants to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” It succeeds at that mission.
Never before has information been so readily available. Never before has it been easier to get in touch with another person and never before has it been easier to maintain contact with another person.
Social networks have provided us the opportunity to connect with people and build better relationships with friends whom we are unable to meet with personally. This allows us to be in contact with so many more people than we ever would be able to in our normal lives.
Before social media existed, your social circle was limited largely to people that you knew in person. But today, you can interact with people from all around the world. This gives you the opportunity to share opinions with a much wider range of people.
This is usually why you can find people who have thousands of Facebook friends. They would never have that many friends if they had to interact with each of them in person.
Before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, texting or cell phones, general communication was much more difficult. The only way you would have been able to talk with someone was to actually see the person, or be lucky enough to have them be free enough to answer a phone call.
It may seem quite simple, but there are actually a lot of little things that had to happen for this exchange of information to take place. Your schedules had to line up and you needed the person that you wanted to speak with to be free at the same time you were or else you wouldn’t get to talk. It gets even worse if you want to get a message out to a large group of people.
Now you can simply type up your message and send it away in a matter of seconds. The other person knows exactly what you needed them to do, no matter where they are or what they are doing.
The amount of work that it takes now to get a message out to thousands of people is just a simple push of the send button.
But social media has even more of an effect on our lives than just communication. It also allows us to get opinions and and form groups in ways that would have been completely unheard of in the past.
Before, you could always have written a letter to the local newspaper or even could have bought the time on a television station. But these were still controlled by that newspaper or television station. That meant that if they didn’t like what you had to say they could prevent you from saying it. Nowadays, you can use social media to get your uncensored message out to thousands or even millions of people.
All you need is a laptop, tablet or cell phone with an Internet connection and it is likely that you won’t ever be forced to lose contact with the people that you care about.
Also, it’s not like social media is the first thing that has been blamed for the downfall of civilization. Television, video games, movies and music have all had turns as the reason people treat each other worse than in yesteryears.
Now do these social media sites have downfalls? Of course they do. They have possibly made us much worse spellers and have begun almost an entirely new language filled with abbreviations and shorthand. With people that do not understand or do not keep up with the latest abbreviations it can make communication more difficult.
We will all soon have to learn the language of the future that will unfortunately be filled with “ilys,” “omgs” and “c u tmrws.”
The world of communication is changing, and we must accept that this is something that comes with the changing of the times. Technology can only make our lives easier if we fully allow it into our lives.
Social media has not made us worse at talking face-to-face but it has made us need face-to-face communication less and less. And that’s not entirely a bad thing.
