No Name
No Teacher
ENC 1101
13 November 2014
Social Media: The Good and The Bad
When visiting a restaurant, how many couples or groups of people dining together are simultaneously looking down at their cell phones, instead of engaging in a real-life conversation? People of all ages and backgrounds have entangled themselves to the ever-growing technological world around us. It is clearly visible that social media has affected today's society and how people communicate with one another. We must ask ourselves, is social media helping us keep in touch; or hurting us?
Many can argue that social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter have made forming relationships easier than ever before. A video chat website called Skype boasts its ability to connect friends and relatives from all over the world. Others suggest the online form of interaction is making it much harder for people to form actual interpersonal skills and our culture is falling deeper and deeper into a technological pit of less human interaction. Both sides can present research and evidence to back up these claims. There have been many studies by different organizations on how social media has affected different age groups. The National Institute of Health concluded younger people who have in-person relations are those who are more likely to utilize social networking sites as further outlets for interacting with friends (Jones). There are different studies can also been linked to negative affects of social media. For example, cyber bullying and “cat fishing” have sparked anti-social media campaigns as well as television shows. These outcomes show that social media sites can be constructive or injurious to how we react in an offline setting. When it comes to interacting online, we have full control over who and when we interact with someone, as well as what we would like people to know about us. This becomes useful for those who are considered shy or are uncomfortable meeting new people in real life, but can also be misleading when compared to how we act when actually meeting others.
Political Science Major, Haley Jones states, “Technology’s rampant popularization over the past decade in terms of social media has meant that texting, Facebook, and Twitter have inevitably taken over as the most efficient ways of communicating with each