Social Media is making people ANTISOCIAL: Mehak Thapar
The Voice of Chandigarh: Living in the 21st century, where technology has become a safety blanket, it has become really important for us to understand some integral part of this technology. One such part is Social Media. Modern society has become more and more obsessed with technology in the shape of PCs, Tablets, Laptops, and most important of all Smartphones.
In today’s world mobiles have become more than just devices; it has become our life, a device we desperately cling to and can’t keep unchecked for more than an hour. One of the main reasons for this obsession with our phones is Social Media. Social Media has transformed the way we interact and meet each other. It facilitates sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks. This includes applications like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. These apps were developed to bring the world closer. Friends and families living in different countries or cities could stay in touch and stay connected through these apps. People could also use these to enlarge their networks by interacting with people online and forming new friendships.
However, it is threatening that due to excessive use of Social Media people are getting addicted to it and spend most of their time online. Due to this addiction and obsession to these social media sites, people are losing real life interaction with the people around them. It has created barriers among people, it causes teenagers, adults and children to develop a habit of checking their phones again and again instead of communicating with the people around them.
Nowadays people have hundreds of friends online but very few or no real-life friends. Out of hundreds of online friends, more than fifty percent are unknown and they haven’t even met or seen each other. People have confined themselves to the four walls of the room and spend most of their free time scrolling through their social media handles and chatting with their online friends instead of going out and socializing. They are so busy in their social media life, that they have forgotten that they have real-life friends and family to attend to. People are becoming so used to communicating through texting that face-to-face interactions have reduced very much. Instead of meeting someone in person, they just text them due to which meaningful conversations do not happen. There is no emotional connection while texting as emotions, tone, body language, the mood of the person can’t be seen through texts.
The real-life relationships may begin to mimic the shallow relationships of social media if we’re unable to dedicate uninterrupted time to deeper connections. YES, it fuels our already broken society.
At the moment the world has become fully dependent on technology, most importantly smartphones and social media. Social Media was meant to make a person more social but instead, it has made a person more antisocial. Excessive use of social media has created serious issues in everyone’s lives.
Social networking is a double-edged sword and has really made us less social.
