Negative Effects of Social Media

Has social media ruined our social skills? In my opinion, yes. Yes indeed.

When we were kids and when our parents were growing up, people would either have to call each other on the phone or see each other in person to communicate. We could not bury our noses underneath our cell phones to avoid making conversation with other people or to avoid talking to someone we did not like. We knew how to carry a conversation and make eye contact.

Now, we do not even have to see a person or talk on the phone to communicate with them. We can simply go to Facebook and write on people's walls, send private messages, or use instant messaging. This helps to avoid/prevent those akward silences everyone dreads. You have time to think about what you want to say to the person before you say it, without akward pauses. You do not have to make eye contact whatsoever. If you want to see the person, you can simply look at a photo on their facebook but only you can see them, and they do not see you. This makes you feel more comfortable not being face-to-face and having to make eye contact with this person and decide what to talk about. You can even pretened to be someone else! Or maybe get advice from a friend on how you should reply to the person you are having a "conversation" with.

So many time, I will go to a store, a restaurant, a cafe, etc. and all I see is people constantly checking their iPhones for their Facebook and Twitter updates. People will not even say "Hello" to you because they are so engrossed with whatever they are doing on their iPhones.

Our society is losing the ability to initiate face-to-face conversation with other people. Some of us meet people online who we have never even met in person, and when we do meet in person, we do not know what to say to each other and it is "akward". People may say things they would never say in person to someone through Facebook. Or maybe a really shy person acts like someone who is extremely outgoing and talkative, but when you meet that person they do not have a word to say to you.

When we do socialize with people face-to-face, it is almost always something involving social media, such as things someone posted on Twitter as their status, or a photo someone uploaded onto their Facebook that is getting a lot of attention. Most of what teens talk about with each other involves topics such as social media. People merely gossip.

It is so irritating to me when people cannot wait longer than ten minutes before having to check their iPhones for news feed and updates.

Not only has the social media ruined our social skills; it has also ruined our spelling and grammar. When people post on Twitter or Facebook, they usually could care less about spelling, capitalization, punctuation, etc. Think about when it comes time to fill out a job application and it is just filled and filled with numerous spelling errors. What employer will ever want to hire you if you cannot even do such a basic thing as spelling words correctly or using proper punctuation and grammar? I know I sure wouldn't want to hire that person.

I wish we could go back to the days when things like Twitter did not exist. I personally have never had a Twitter account in my life, and I still do not see the point of it. Who cares what you are doing at every precise moment in your life? What makes you think it is so important that you have to share it with the rest of the world? What ever happend to the thing known as "privacy"???

I wish I could say it's time for a change, but in reality, I do not know how the effects of something like this can be reversed. It is truly sad.

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