Social Media and Virtual Reality - Essay Example

?Part I - Topic Development General Topic: Are social media and increasing access to virtual reality altering our social interactions and expectations? 1. What is your thesis statement? My thesis statement is that social media has increased access to virtual reality that has also altered our social interactions and expectations. I will be using on-line articles from reputable sources as well as various journals relevant to the topic in order to support my position. 2. What are the social/cultural and ethical aspects of the issue you have chosen and what is their significance to American life? The social/cultural and ethical aspects that I will concentrate on pertain to privacy issues and the development of friendships, as well a social circles on-line. These are activities that Americans previously loved to do in real time using physical interaction but has now migrated to virtual settings within the context of social media. 3. What are the opponents of your position likely to claim? My opponents will be most likely to claim that social media has enhanced the social lives of people and allowed for a greater degree of friendship development since social media is used as a world wide connectivity and discussion tool. 4. What is your response or reason that suggests your opponents are incorrect? Simply put, we may have a large friends list in our social media accounts but we do not really know anything about them. Social media creates shallow friendships that do not last beyond a shared interest in a particular activity. These are simply friendships suggested by the social media based upon our perceived likes and dislikes. 5. Cite at least TWO outside resources that support your position and one that expresses the objection to your position. Two outside sources that support my position will come from Jay Baer's article “Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy” along with Kathleen C. and Anuhea R.'s “Free Speech: Benefit or Liability?”. Social Media Has Increased Our Access to Virtual Reality And Altered our Social Interactions and Expectations Before the rise of social media, people interacted in a physical manner on a daily basis. News was shared with one another through regular meet-ups, over lunches, and even phone conversations. For those living far apart from friends, postal mail was the way to go in terms of keeping in touch. Needless to say, making and keeping friends during the time of our parents really required effort in order to get to know each other and stay in touch. but all of that changed with the advent of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, all of these social channels allowed for instant connectivity among friends. It also allowed people to make friends with other people based upon shared likes and interests. The time had come for the rise of easy contact and making friends all over the world. Sadly, even though social media has created an excellent virtual reality setting that allows us to interact across the seas, it has also altered our social interactions and expectations in a negative manner. This paper will look at two of the main reasons for the negative influence of social media over our lives and methods of interacting with people as opposed to those who believe that social media has provided a tremendous benefit to our social interactions using various articles and journals that support and opposed the issue respectively. Let me start off this discussion with the reasons that people say social media has positively affected our social interaction and expectations. Proponents of social media say that the instant communication allowed by the system makes part of the conversation by allowing them to participate in discussions rather than talking at them (Folkens, Dave “3 Ways Social Media is Changing Public Relations”). By allowing people to have their say via social media, the group interaction helps to remove the communication barriers that used to exist for people during the infancy of the internet. As such, the internet has become a livelier, more colorful and informative place to hang out in. Specially when people who connected via social media get together to discuss common interests. There are also those who believe that technology, by creating new templates of communication has managed to redefine the internet and our mass communication landscape. However, this freedom of speech has come with a price that has redefined the meaning of ethics over the web. The advent of social media has also created a generation of rude, unethical people who hide behind the anonymity of the internet when sharing their hurtful thoughts through social media platforms. I must admit that social media has made it much easier for people to share their thoughts with a larger group of people on an instant basis. However, the existing openness and easy access to communication is not without fault. Most recently, the easy access to open and instant communication has made bullying front page news. Take for example the following story: The most recent story reported on the news was the mother of a sixteen year old girl creating a fake myspace of a young boy trying to bully a classmate of her daughter’s who later committed suicide. Situations like these question how free speech in a social media environment can affect those involved (C., Kathleen & Anihea, R. “Free Speech Benefit or Liability?”). When we talk about social media, we cannot really be sure that the people we talk to are really the people whom they say they are. As such, we do not expect too much from them with regards to respecting the privacy of one another or even expect the same decency guidelines based on physical interaction, to apply to the virtual reality scenario. That is why social media interaction is like the Wild West. Due to the lack of clear cut guidelines and decency rules, people pretty much say what they want in any manner they wish with a total disregard for the feelings of others. This to me, is one of the biggest problems with communication via social media and this problem needs to be corrected as soon as possible. Before even more people get hurt because of the lack of discipline within the social media circles. It was Jay Baer (“Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy”) who explained the dangers and disappointments that people are set up for once they rely on social media for their regular interaction with people. Social media has allowed people to make friends overseas without ever having to leave the comfort of their own home. Open communication among people in this group tends to give a false sense of friendship and camaraderie. After all, how can you become fast friends with people across the seas whom you cannot get to know on a real time basis due to the location barrier? Sure, social media removes that barrier when it comes to sharing information with one another. But where is the part when you get to really know the person behind the alias? Social media does not allow us to read the character of people that can be read simply by their body actions. These days, we have to take their word for it. The problem with social media interaction and expectations is this: ... those situations where we “meet” someone through social media, have the opportunity to interact in real life, and then develop a relationship that creates true friendship are few and far between. And as social media gets bigger and more pervasive, this chasm becomes even more difficult to cross. (Baer, Jay “Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy”). It is funny how social media allows people to create a circle of friends and yet does not allow them to actually get to know each other deeper than the shallow friendship that was created by a common interest. It is utterly impossible to share personal details with strangers whom we shall never get to truly know. Yet we somehow manage to call them friends. Let us remember that the social media technology was fully expected to help bring people closer by keeping them in constant touch. But in reality, social media is driving a wedge between people because even though we know each other by name or even by face through pictures and skype, we truly know less and less about them because we do not have a real interest in getting to know about the lives of people with whom we have no cultural traditions or experiences in common with. That is why I believe that the social interaction and expectations that we have of social media is extremely shallow. We know that technology has its limitations and as we continue to push those boundaries, we will slowly come to realize that although we are surrounded by people's names on-line, we are still alone where we are physically located. Social media virtual reality will, in my opinion, never take the place of real time physical contact when making friends. Works Cited Baer, Jay. “Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy”. Social Networks. convinceandconvert.com. n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2013. C. Kathleen & R. Anuhea. “Free Speech: Benefit or Liability?”.Student Journal of Media Literacy Education. (2010). 5. Web. 7 Dec. 2013. Folkens, Dave. “3 Ways Social Media is Changing Public Relations”. TopRank. toprankblog.com. n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2013. Read More