The Decline of Face to Face Communication
For a particular category of people, who have an outgoing nature and would have made friends quickly anyway, it's doubtful social media would make much of a difference. They would still have relationships and social circles outside the media. For them, the social media is just an extension of their real-world. It all depends on the person and how one uses it. Some people might use social media to enhance their relationships and meet new people, where others might use it to quantify the amount of friends they have or use it to spy on people so that they don't have to talk to them face-to-face.
People are now more interested in virtual relationships, membership, and communication rather than going into real scenarios and having a sense of what's happening all around. Social media is making us a little less social. It has a tendency to make us anti-social in many indirect and not so obvious ways. It's true that it has given us ways to reach out to a larger set of people and redefined the way we interact with each other. It certainly has helped us to know about how different people think. So these are some of the positives of this new age of using social media, but ideally, we should have become more and more socially connected as a result of using social media. In reality, that doesn't seem to be happening. Turkle states that, "Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We'd rather text than talk." (1).
People are getting more and more addicted to screens. They are starting to believe that being continually on the Internet makes them connected to the outside world. Little do they realise that it is only consuming them, and it's just their screens that are linked to other screens and not to actual people. Wishing someone ‘happy returns’ on their birthday has been reduced to just doing so on their Facebook walls or messaging them on Whatsapp. Gone are the days of wishing them in person let alone calling them on the phone. This practice has become so common that its ridiculousness is hardly noticed. This is just one of the examples of how socially disconnected it is making us.
One of the reasons that people get easily glued to online social networking is the level of their openness that they are able to display on this platform. People seem to be more quite open and free to express their thoughts when it comes to doing it in an online situation. For instance, it's easy for a guy to compliment a stranger on her beauty on the Internet. How many have the courage to step up and do that in person? This is the difference between a real Society and a virtual online Society. The extraordinary growth of dating sites both national and international is a sure sign that our ability to communicate and form relationships may be diminishing. The original concept of the development of electronic communication was to bring people who were separated by great distances and in other countries closer together. It may be viewed as having got out of hand when we now have families, neighbourhoods, and friends all linked with some form of social media.
It might be said that in its current form social media is quantity based rather than quality based. Given the nature of the medium perhaps we have yet to understand and measure its benefits. Pring writes, "Your mission, should you choose to join Facebook, is to prove to everyone else that you are awesome, and they should want to be you. You must do everything in your power to make your life appear better than everyone else's" (Thesocialskinny.com).This other line of thought might that an increase in social activity is a result of social media. It's possible that an individual may prefer heading out on a weekend night with a few friends where they will be able to take lots of photos and message people about the great night they are having. They can upload all this excitement onto their social feed. Truth be told, they might well have preferred to stay at home and watch a movie with some chocololate and wine keeping the cat company.
Social media such as Facebook gives you a larger group of followers, whom you may classify as friends. Whether they be simply friends you have on Facebook and not real friends seeing you haven’t met is irrelevant. You still stay in touch sharing personal activities that you all had or enjoyed each day or week or month. When you finally meet with you friends you have already shared many moments digitally so there is no awkwardness in the personal social contact. "Digital communication technologies are contributing to new ideas and experiences of intimacy, friendship, and identity through new forms of social interaction and new techniques of public display, particularly on social network sites” (Chambers 1).
The decrease in face-to-face interaction can be attributed to social media. You could say that individuals felt the same way when communication was done through letter writing and telephone calls after the invention of the phone. It made communication a little more impersonal. When people learned to read and write, it was suggested that communication between people would suffer badly, and it would be the end of society. In fact, that is true. It was the end of the civilization as we knew it for thousands of years. That's the way in which communication is evolving. To determine the truth of this, there needs to be some deeper research on how much time devices actually take away from face-to-face interaction.
The argument can be dependent on what you take as the meaning of the word ‘social’. There is some debate about the smartphone being the main cause for that aspect of social media making us less social. Some people prefer to call people on their mobile rather than meet them in a conversation, as if the phone is a sort of security blanket. From people traveling on public transport to those that might be at a party or a bar it can be worrying to see their head buried in their smartphones rather than being aware of their surroundings. There's a fine line between people being on their phone and the time in which they decide to make that call, receive that call, or check their social pages. It would seem very strange if you were in the middle of a chat with a friend and you suddenly answered a call from another friend who was perhaps telling you what they had for lunch.
Online interaction can tend to make the reality of what it means to be social a little unreal and perhaps in a way, wrong. Online social communication shows us what friends might be doing in a video they have created, or a heap of photographs and what we see is what they want us to see. People like to portray that they are living the perfect life when, in fact, we know that that is not anywhere near the truth. There’s nothing like reverting to real-life which, believe it or not, is a darn sight more interesting. It's true that perception shapes everything. The extent to which we are forgoing face-to-face for mobile companionship is a concern. Perhaps what we need is more real face and less Facebook.
The arguments for and against can also depend on the generation you're talking about. For the Baby Boomers or Generation X, the use of social media may have enhanced their communication skills. However for Millennial's and younger generations it can be thought to be harmful because there wasn't a lot of emphasis placed on face to face and social communication in person. Soar says, "Spoken or face to face communication demands a degree of instant, human reaction and empathy that premeditated, typed forms of communication can allow us to mask or manufacture to some degree" (brandwatch.com).
Our social habits are changing, hand in glove with the technologies of our times. Social access, availability, self-image, and much more are indeed bound up with social media use for many of us. In this sense, social media are prosocial. However, if we take social to mean face-to-face interactions and encounters, for some, social media sometimes seems to offer substitutes and mediating crutches of the sort. Communication through devices is in some way safer than face to face. The less you have to deal with the energy and intensity of face-to-face, the more you are apt to avoid it. Rarely nowadays do conversations unfold over hours, you can be done and dusted with a Facebook post or a short email. The tone of someone’s voice cannot be expressed in a text or Facebook message and can sometimes be the primary cause of online arguments. Is social media killing the ability to understand how things are said? There is a tendency to avoid face-to-face conversations as most people don’t have the courage to say things in person because there might be a lack of understanding in the tone.
Does using social media diminish us? It’s probably not strictly true because social networks actually amplify our ability to interact in the real world. Online is actually very real, especially if you are the kind of person who is good at integrating your online and offline social networks. It is possible to meet lots of new people through online interactions, build friendships around the world and even travel to meet and stay with some them. If you really think about it, there are is an enormous number of people in the real world who are actually isolated, living alone or without friendships, and for many of them, online social networks provide an incredible opportunity to connect with others who have similar interests, values, and experiences around the world. You can say that social media has brought the entire world much closer with the ability to share all these things as well as customs and cultures. You can’t meet your friend who is in some other country. The only way to catch up with that person is through social media. Social media and new social channels are making the connections so much easier. It is a personalised tool to get connected with the people who are far away and with whom you want to chat and maintain a relationship.
Looking at this in another way you can say that bars and discos are supposed to make people more social. But even there, alcoholics and antisocial elements can make such places unfriendly. It’s not unusual to see people at these social venues totally immersed in their mobile phones communicating with people other than those that are present. Time spent staring at our phones is incompatible with time spent actually engaging the people around us in conversation. Is this because very few people have the discipline or the emotional intelligence to keep the two separate? Humans may be abusing the luxuries and technologies given to us. This use of social networking sites makes us feel that there is no point in meeting each other because we think we are already in touch.
In conclusion, it might be said that social media can supplement and enrich real-life relationships by enabling people to keep in touch, make plans and share. There are a various number of different types of social media and they do a great job of keeping us updated on all the different activities and events in our lives. They also help us to communicate digitally with our group of online friends whom we may have never met personally. It can also mean that this form of communication allows those who are otherwise socially awkward to express themselves more freely and quickly, and strips away prejudices based on age, gender, race, etc. In fact, it’s possible that social media enables people to be less awkward than any generation previous. Now you can give people instant feedback on their actions and allow them a chance to adjust their behaviour. We also establish relationships based on shared interests rather than proximity and meaningful relationships are maintained and cultivated via social media. It can be said that social media is just a tool. What we do with the tool is what makes it useful or not. Social media in its essence is what the Internet has developed into. All it’s doing is letting us consume and share ideas.
Works Cited
Turkle, S. Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Print.
“Is Facebook Ruining Our (Real) Social Lives.” The Social Skinny. 8 February 2011.
Web 18 April 2016.
Chambers, D. Social Media and Personal Relationships.UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
“Is Social Media Making Us Anti-Social?” Brandwatch. 27 April 2011. Web 18 April 2016.
