Does social media improve or impede communication?
Isabelle Osborne explores the effects of social media dependence on how we communicate with each other.
Social media: the beating heart of the 21st century. As of 2017, 3.8 billion people worldwide have an online presence in some capacity. Social media is invaluable for connecting and communicating with people across the globe, building professional and personal relationships, and allowing us to capture the present moment and make it last.
Yet in a world where the average daily time on social networking sites has increased to 136 minutes, are the devices in our hands threatening traditional, face-to-face interactions?
In addition to the issues of rising anxiety, media addiction and deteriorating self-esteem, social media sites prioritise a form of communication that humans are not naturally inclined to adopt. Prior to the rise of social media, communicating with people who were not in the immediate vicinity was incredibly limited, but now we are able to chat to people on the other side of the world at the mere click of a finger.
It’s easy to forget that there’s a virtual barrier between us and the person we’re talking to: a barrier that perhaps obstructs our ability to talk directly with that person. The non-verbal ways we can communicate face-to-face, such as the use of hand gestures and facial expressions, are missing in online conversations, and often this can result in misunderstandings, perhaps making online communication more open to ambiguities and misinterpretations.
Arguably, people have become so conditioned to communicating via a screen that the traditional person-to-person contact has become a social anxiety that many shy away from. It is undeniable that communicating personally with people allows us to develop deeper, more meaningful connections, yet as our digital profiles evolve, our ability to form personable connections becomes more difficult.
One survey has shown that 74 percent of Millennials talk to others online more than in person, highlighting how enormously society has changed since the rise of social media. FOMO — “fear of missing out” — has become so intense that people would rather pause dinner-table conversation to refresh their Facebook feed or snap a picture of their food for their Instagram story.
Verbal communication isn’t the only thing at risk of decline: students’ literacy skills have been increasingly compromised by abbreviations and poor grammar. Social media does not only affect our ability to listen and engage with others, but also our ability to effectively communicate on paper.
The question must be asked: could scrolling through our social media channels replace conversation altogether? One study showed that 62 percent of people asked admitted to using digital gadgets while with others, as if our addiction to checking social media is prioritised over face-to-face conversation. It seems that conversing through messages online is becoming the norm.
This is not to say society should revert to using pigeons to pass messages. There are many valuable components of social media that have benefited society enormously. But when the figures suggest that our society is so heavily affected by our online identities, we have a right to fear what the future may look like. Arguably, those who are in the most danger of communicative displacement are those of the young generation. Now that more than four in 10 parents have said that they would “allow their child to use social media ahead of them reaching the minimum age required”, it is perhaps only a matter of time before our society fails to communicate actively and effectively.
Ironically, our world has seemingly devolved into a state of caveman incompetence, as we lack the capacity to converse and connect without a virtual keyboard and emojis. And so, while sending a text or snapping a picture may increase the quantity of communication, the quality of such communication will always be weaker.
It’s not surprising that TV programmes such as Netflix’s Black Mirror, a speculative satirisation of technology’s influence on human nature, leaves watchers feeling uncomfortable. The issues explored suggest the rise of an uncannily relatable society to that which we find ourselves in today.
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