Social Media and Social Bonds - Essay Example

Social Media and Social Bonds The importance of social media in today’s world cannot be overlooked. It enables people to communicate in situations where there may be vast geographical distances between them. It helps people who are in dictatorships to escape surveillance. There is a dark side to all of this though. Social media causes many people to stay within their homes at times that they would have spent in interacting with real people. This paper shall argue that social media, despite its positive effects, has a long way to go before people are able to strike a balance between its virtual attractions and real life. Shawn Ghuman in his essay “Is Technology Destroying Social Bonds?” notes how social media has led to the reduction of inter-person interaction in a real way. The argument is against the decline of what the author perceives as real relationships and conversations. For instance, he says, While chatting with friends, reading statuses, and skimming tweets, I wonder what happened to traditional communication in the current tech-savvy era. Our lives seemingly revolve around receiving digital messages, as we spend countless hours staring at screens and communicating with people online even though they are geographically close (110). While the author does have a point in the case of certain sections of people who may have had problems communicating even before the advent of social media, in the case of others, their extroversion may have merely transposed itself onto a virtual space. In many instances, plans for real interactions may even materialize on social media before they happen in a real space. Thus, social media, while it is a virtual reality, may even in its nascent stages, facilitate rather than debilitate real interactions. The author also speaks of the relevance of social media in improving social bonds, albeit in a few lines. For instance, he says that social media has provided people with “an opportunity to stay instantly in touch with others locally, nationally and internationally” (110). This can be seen in the important role that was played by websites such as Facebook and Twitter during the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring was a political uprising that led to the downfall of many despotic regimes in the Arab world- countries such as Tunisia and Egypt. This was orchestrated through messages and short texts in order to escape the mechanism of surveillance. Through the course of the essay, the author reiterates at numerous points that contrary to the popular notion that social networking and modern technology have widened the scope of human communication, there is ample reason to believe the reverse. He uses persuasive reasoning by posing certain rhetorical questions to the readers urging them to reassess the role of technology in their lives. The most significant of these is the one where the reader is asked to think of instances where he/she may have connected with a person on Facebook or other similar social networking websites but upon meeting the individual in person may be discovered that they are in fact incompatible. This stems from the larger point of social media allowing individuals to create virtual personalities for themselves which may not be reflective of who they truly are. Consequently, their social lives become limited largely confined to the virtual world as factors such as social awkwardness and introversion which may otherwise inhibit a person’s socialization are absent here. The writer also problematizes the idea that technology has simplified our lives. The argument here is that this seeming pursuit for simplicity and comfort may have actually resulted in oversimplification and sloth. This is seen in the lines “We can make ourselves sound intelligent, meaningful, or witty. Cellphones have become the faces of their users, and messages have become direct reflections of our personalities.” The availability of an easy avenue to mold our personalities to suit various situations without applying the effort to be appealing to others is in fact making us intellectually deficient. Thus, one no longer needs to be well-read, well-travelled or sociable to appear smart or humorous; these attributes can be simulated in the virtual world. The essay also refers also to certain rules which pertain to interactions on social media. Rules, which if analyzed, do not quite seem logical. For instance, boys are expected to message a girl only after a certain number of days after they meet for the fear of appearing overeager and people refrain from responding to a message as soon as receive it for they might then be “perceived as overly anxious.” Ironically, the carefully tailored rules to not appear “desperate” or “anxious” result in a great deal of anxiety with individuals obsessing over how their behavior vis-à-vis social networking and/or other forms of technologized communication is perceived by others. Furthermore, it is evident that far from strengthening social bonds such rules actually inhibit them by placing restrictions on how much a person can interact with another and when. The author fortifies his arguments by alluding to hugely popular television shows such as Friends and Seinfeld which belong an era where the social media was not yet as integral a part of everyday human lives as it is now. The examples seek to demonstrate that neither the friendship of the characters on these shows nor their popularity relied on the use of social networking or cellphones. The essay ends by offering a viable alternative to the obsessive use of social media. He does not suggest that we completely abandon our cellphones or the use of websites such as Facebook and Twitter. He suggests instead that we use these mediums of communication to an optimum level and judge the worth of our lives through genuine human bonds and not virtual ones. Social media thus has a social role to play. It probably does not strengthen individual bonds. However, it does strengthen bonds between peoples who may be suffering from similar fates. However, the fact that they do cause people to entangle themselves in relationships that are not real and may cause problems at a real level as a result of virtual expectations remains a valid point. Places of social interactions such as parties have become less active as a result of people constantly checking their gadgets for new information. Conferences, seminars and family gatherings have been places where one finds that social media has been turned into a nuisance rather than facilitating better communication among the people present. Works Cited Ghuman, Shawn. “Is Technology Destroying Social Bonds?” Collegiate Times Virginia Tech. 22 Feb 2012. Web. 19 Dec 2013. Read More