It’s crazy to think about a time before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. With a touch of a finger, you can communicate with anyone anywhere at anytime.
So yes, thank you Social Media — you’ve made the world smaller…but is this a good thing? On a macro-level, it gives us a sense of connectivity and a new method of instant communication that we’ve never had before. At any given time, you can stay connected with your old “friends”, make new “internet friends” that you’ve never met before, read up on your favorite celebrity’s latest updates, and go Facebook-stalk your ex-boyfriend.
Concept: A 3 day slumber party where all of my internet friends can hang out with me & we can eat junk food & read books.
— Destiny 📝 (@fablesandfae) September 1, 2017
On a micro-level, however it’s a different story. When was the last time you and your friends hung out without someone scrolling through Instagram or posting a Snapchat with some cute new filter?
Social media is tearing us apart.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the evolution of social media and technology in recent years. It allows me to talk to my parents who live in Japan, stay updated on my friends who don’t go to the same college as me, and without it, I would never remember anyone’s birthday.
But today, all our time is spent worrying about how many likes we’ll get on our new post, or our follower-to-following ratio. Our phones might as well be glued to our hands and our Instagram handles written across our foreheads. We’re more comfortable sitting behind our computer screens than we are sitting at the dinner table. We’ve lost our interpersonal skills and forgotten the value of face-to-face communication.
Is social media bringing the world closer at the expense of pulling us apart?
I wanna go back to a time where being liked as a person meant more than the likes on social media…
— Lomara-Crystal👑 (@officiallomarac) September 10, 2017
Thanks for that! You said what I was thinking, too. Social Media is good for long-distance relationships with your boyfriends, partents, friends … but it’s tearing us apart in our daily life with friends you are acutally seeing.
You have a great opinion on this, one that many probably agree with. I like your point about how likes tend to define us. I think we have become a generation who heavily relies on likes, I have even heard my friends competing for likes on their selfies. In the end, I also believe it has an impact on our face-to-face communication. So the real question is, in a time when use of social media is increasing, how do we control or limit it from inhibiting our personal/people skills?