Final Essay

803 Words4 Pages

Glance around your favorite restaurant and you will be troubled to find the number of people who do not have their heads down into their cell phones to scroll through some social networking site. Why would people prefer social media to the company of close ones? That’s maybe because social media enables us to electively select a spectacular filter of our lives, making the insipid exceptional and the clichéd exhilarating. Therefore, we spend everyday of our lives constructing and maintaining an online identity of a certain type of a person: someone who just does not just live life, but lives a lavish life.
We participate with the world, and we do it while looking exceptional. Those who consistently create a life on social media do not always …show more content…

Social media’s effectiveness on our ability to interact and communicate is visible throughout all areas of our society, so what does this mean for interpersonal communication? There has been an alternation in the means we communicate; rather than the face-to-face interaction, we’re more inclined toward the mediated communication. We’d rather Skype than meet; we’d rather text than talk on the phone. Individuals are becoming more social and interactive with others, but the procedure of that communication has changed so that we’re not meeting face-to-face as often as we used to. Our bonds and interactions on social media lend to be weak ties, we do not feel as personally connected or intertwined to the people at the other end of the communication as we do when we’re face to face. So even when we’re communicating more, we may not necessarily be building strong …show more content…

People these days are so used to having their friends appear available online that they rarely meet face to face. Several years ago, before social media even existed, couple of friends would go spend leisure time together on the weekends. Today, popularity in high school holds much more importance to the current youth. These days popularity is known as having an endless amount of likes on every picture or numerable followers on instagram. Just because strangers are familiar to our face, we tend to believe in the prominence we accomplish. Popularity is no longer about having countless friends anymore; it’s all about being known for absolutely nothing. Individuals are bullied online, but never tend to articulate in person, confrontations occur over text messages or statuses but rarely ever face to face. Some people believe that this tool of social media requires less emotional engagement and stress. Others say that social media is what inhibits us from standing up for ourselves in the right manner. Social media also restricts our ability to freely communicate, our conversations are rather hurried and to the point because of the information and updates available on our screens. Readily available information is what disconnects our real life conversations, not only does social media restrict us from conversing with other people but also disrupts interpersonal communication. “Is Social Media Sabotaging Real