In today’s fast-paced technological era, every news about the current state of the world and even about a specific person, is available in one’s pocket through social media. But is that a good thing? Or does it lead to comparison? To lack of articulate conversations? Is social media, a friend or a foe?
Social media includes apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter – accessible anytime, anywhere; updating you constantly. Through these apps communication is quite flexible as you can communicate face-to-face through video calls, or text each other from any corner of the world. For instance, if a family member goes abroad for a job or travel, you can still stay connected from home. So does it really affect a person’s speech, reducing their talking skills?
Conversely, social media is curated to one’s interests making it a hook causing users to escape reality. This way we lose track of time and people hardly go out. It could be seen, that the majority of the youth have a hard time talking to strangers, to the point that simple tasks such as ordering coffee, becomes a chore. Furthermore, no one can sit with themselves without a phone in their hands to avoid their thoughts, leading to less meaningful conversations as we spend most of our time shortening words over text. Social media reduces a person’s ability to formulate their own opinions.
To sum it all up, social media has had a negative effect on our day-to-day conversational skills. As we spend most of our day scrolling by, feeding off other people’s thoughts and opinions without really taking a moment to think for ourselves leading to meaningless conversations both online and in real life. Social media is seen as a method to escape reality, when the truth of the matter is, that its eating away our ability to have communication skills with our loved ones and strangers alike.