Is Social Networking a Huge Step Ahead in Making Human Communication - Essay Example

Is social media really serving the purpose of making people more sociable or is it creating an introverted generation? The discussion around the effects of social media on modern society has been recently heated up by rapid development of social networking websites. Some sociologists and psychologists claim that social networking is a huge step ahead in making human communication better, because people constantly have access to communication, so they would never feel lonely and abandoned (Arnett 529).Social networking indeed has changed people’s view on communicational standards. Still even though communication has become much easier with appearance of social networks, they also have caused such problems as widespread feeling of loneliness, loosing of identity, and social alienation among social media users. Thus social media usage is creating an introverted generation that consists of people who often strive to shrink into themselves and stop taking part in constant social media interactions. The very first reason why people become introverts by constant using of social media is because it is always easier to communicate when nobody watches you. In fact this means that it is certain anonymity and opportunity to dissimulate feelings and personal features during communication, what makes people feel freely while communicating through social media services more than in real life situations. A famous psychologist Phillip Zimbardo defined anonymity as a crucial factor that triggers human feeling of freedom from social responsibility, which often leads to negative consequences (255). Furthermore, social media allows people to create some false personalities and identify themselves with persons different from who they really are. Thus it turns out that people start alienating from themselves and later this may cause certain communicational disability, social anxiety, and even asceticism. For most people exposure of the personalities that they use as masks in social media communication would become a social catastrophe; thus, for instance, Facebook privacy breaches have without a doubt become a nightmare for its users. The fear of losing social media privacy has led to appearance of cyber bullying, which is a huge problem nowadays. Social media bullies play on people’s dependency on social media images, so they often manipulate people by creating breaches in their social networking profiles’ security. Also, cyber bullying contributes to development of introspective tendencies of modern social media generation. Researches on the topic of cyber bullying revealed that cyber bullying not only makes people (more often adolescents) alienated from society but also negatively influences their life satisfaction rates (Moore, Huebner, and Hills 430). The reason why cyber bullying is considered to be one of the most cruel in nowadays society is because social media services has gained quite a lot of influence among modern people and their images in social networks are of crucial importance for them, so their attitude to social media is very serious. One more important aspect of social media influence, that makes people become more introverted, is the tendency to compare the lives of other people, which they observe in social media, with their own ones. When people know that their lives are constantly observed by other social networks users they start demonstrating their lives and events they involved in from the best sides possible in order not to fail in the eyes of others. However, it seems like the tendency to disclose personal life is supposed to help people with low self-esteem to become more comfortable with socialization and feel free demonstrating themselves and their lives, because everybody’s doing it. Still psychological researches on people with low self-esteem showed that usage of Facebook makes them feel even more uncomfortable and miserable for many reasons such as seeing somebody else’s success or receiving unpleasant feedbacks from other users of social network services (Forest & Wood 595). Thus it turns out that in the aspect of personality disclosure people often gain more complexes and traumas, instead of becoming more confident and free in self-expression. Psychological researches on the matter of relation between social media usage and depression denote that social media users often become depressed and antisocial for several reasons, including the one mentioned above that concern the fact that people tend to compare themselves with others and they often fail in the competition of whose life is better (Shaw and Gant 159). In fact, in social media services, it doesn’t matter whose life is better “in reality”, it is the matter of craft of demonstration what really gives people credit. The problem of social media addiction has been raised ever since social networking servicer appeared. The fact that many people are addicted to the constant communication through social networks is obvious. In the article “Is Facebook Distorting Your View on the World” Jessica Grogan describes the feelings she experienced once when she realized that surfing Facebook made her feel bored and passively existing. She claims that a social network not only consumes a lot of time but also makes people devastated and frustrated (n.pag). This happens because most of time people spend on Facebook is on no specific purposes, so it turns out that they just passively go from one page to another, feeling like they don’t have anything to do in particular on Facebook, but in the meantime they can’t get out of there. The point is that social media users get addicted to a specific style of communication that the media dictate to them. Furthermore, social networking is not only a tool of communication and informational sharing – it is a specific kind of modern culture. Users of social networking services have all required attributes of separated culture like own discourse, ethical rules and, of course, a special environment. As far as social networking culture is an inherent part of modern culture in general, so it has created a specific way of thinking in people’s minds. For instance, they don’t worry about how to find information or reach people they want to get to know because all of it is mostly available. Perhaps, this can also lead to some unpleasant consequences like that nowadays people are difficult to get lost if they don’t want to interact with somebody. Furthermore, their social media addiction can cause the contradictory desires to quit from it and disability to do it, which not only creates introspective attitude to socialization but also makes people depressed. Works Cited Forest, Amanda L. and Wood, Joanne V. “When Social Networking Is Not Working: Individuals With Low Self-Esteem Recognize but Do Not Reap the Benefits of Self-Disclosure on Facebook”. Psychological Science. 23(2012): 295-302. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. “Adolescents’ Uses of Media for Self-Socialization”. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. 24(1995): 519-532. Zimbardo, P. 1969. “The Human Choice: Deindividuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos.” Pp. 237-307 in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation edited by William Arnold and David Levine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Moore, Page Malmsjo, Huebner, E. Scott and Hills, Kimberly J. “Electronic Bullying and Victimization and Life Satisfaction in Middle School Students”. Social Indicators Research. 107(2012): 429-447. Grogan, Jessica. “Is Facebook Distorting Your View on the World”. Encountering America. March 2014: n.pag. Shaw, Lindsay H. and Gant, Larry M. "In Defense of the Internet: The Relationship between Internet Communication and Depression, Loneliness, Self-Esteem, and Perceived Social Support". CyberPsychology & Behavior. 5(2002): 157-171. Read More