social media has destroyed real life communication essay

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How Has Social Media Affected Communication: Facts that Surprise!

Updated: February 28, 2024

Published: April 4, 2020

It’s no surprise that the widespread use of social media for communicating ideas, personal and professional stories and experiences has had a profound effect on the overall way people communicate today. Just how has social media affected communication, you ask? In more ways than you may think! But not all are bad — just look at our list of social media effects on communication.

What is Social Media?

Social media can be described as the collection of online platforms that involve sharing and collaborating with an online community by posting, commenting, and interacting with one another. The most commonly used social media platforms today are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

Photo by  Tracy Le Blanc  from  Pexels

Social media effects on communication.

Around 3 billion people use social media today, which means that 40% of the world uses social media for communication. It’s no surprise that this widespread use has social media effects on communication.

11% of adults reported preferring staying home on Facebook than going out on the weekend. Communication is affected in ways such as personal expression, our expectations of others, and the way companies communicate with customers.

Exposure to Messaging

Information overload.

Many people tend to binge on social media, spending hours and hours scrolling though sites. Ultimately, this may lead to a constant craving of more internet and more social media consumption. The more people get, the more they want — and it’s hard to stop the cycle.

Photo by  Kaboompics .com  from  Pexels

Young people read news.

Social media has made reading the news cool again. According to Wibbitz, 23% of young users get news from social media , and a whopping 61% get political news from Facebook . On social media, people share interesting news they read, and they can follow various news sources’ pages.

Getting the Full Picture

Stories — a part of Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook — mean that people get the full picture of an event, activity, or occurrence in someone’s life. We no longer just get a snapshot of a home-cooked meal, we might see the entire process from start to finish.

This has changed the way people think about what to post — there is much less thought put into a post when it is a story that will be erased after 24 hours.

Boredom in Conversation

Here’s a sad social media effect on communication. We are becoming bored when we have real, in-person conversations. People have such a need for social media consumption and that instant, colorful feedback only social media can give, they will often become bored during real conversations, resorting to their phones. This can lead to a decrease in the quality and number of meaningful conversations.

Reactions to Non-Verbal, Emotional, and Social Cues

In-person reactions to non-verbal, emotional, or social cues are changing in that people don’t need to respond to these types of communication when they are online. This leads to less experience and awareness of others’ needs based on these types of cues that can only be received from in-person communication.

Self Expression

Sense of urgency.

No one has to wait for longer than a few hours for a response, and people have come to expect that timeline for conversations. There is so much of a sense of urgency that people are often anxious if they haven’t heard back from a family member, friend, or partner in a number of hours.

Photo by  Cristian Dina  from  Pexels

Need to share.

Social media has created a feeling among users that they must share whatever they are doing — from restaurant orders, to concerts, to the books they are reading. This can be a social media positive effect because people are getting more exposure to things they might not otherwise, such as new reads. But it can also be a negative effect as it can urge people to become dependent on posting anything occurring in their own lives and painting those occurrences as rosier than they truly are.

Photo by  Vinicius Wiesehofer  from  Pexels

How we value ourselves.

When people see others having a wonderful life, as represented on social media, they tend to have a negative self-image, and start to devalue their own ways of life. In addition, there is a feeling of needing to paint an inaccurately positive and ‘fun’ version of one’s own life which leads to feelings of negativity about one’s ‘real’ life.

Inside Perspective of Afar

One of the positive effects of social media is the ability to get an intimate view of other cultures and places. With social media, especially on Instagram, users are able to see what others are doing around the world. People are exposed to travel ideas, new cultures, and ways of life unlike before.

Broadcasting Live

Broadcasting live started as a fun, innocent idea to share life’s moments, but it’s transformed to become a large part of political movements, sharing some dark aspects of today’s society. The option to post live videos has created an important platform for serious issues that need to be spoken about.

Personalized Digital Messages

Both Instagram and Snapchat have popularized the highly personalized message. People can now completely change their own faces with selfie filters, or draw pictures to send to friends, and more. Creativity soars, which is a great thing, but people can start to spend too much time personalizing picture messages.

Communication Style

1. summarized writing.

Starting with the limited character text messaging of the 2000s, and nowadays with the 140-character tweet, messages have been getting shorter and more concise. Other areas of communication have adapted for summarized writing as well, such as in shortened work memos, shortened academic communication between students and professors, and shortened messages in advertising.

2. Abbreviations

The abbreviated style of communicating that became popular when text messaging started in the 00’s has continued into online conversations. It has also made its way into traditionally non-abbreviated forms of communication such as spoken language, email communication, and even academic forms of writing. This has caused concern among some academics, citing studies that show a causation between “textese” and negative effects on literacy skills such as writing skills and reading accuracy. Other studies show that using “textese” has no effect on spelling ability, or correct grammar use. For a full review of related studies, see this meta-analysis .

3. Unfiltered Interactions

Social media and internet interactions offer a veil between the person sending and the person receiving the message. These interactions are no longer face to face, and this can lead to some unfiltered conversations as people feel they can say anything with no repercussions.

4. GIFs and Emojis

5. Viral Messages

That quick and easy “share” button on so many social media platforms has led to the phenomenon of “going viral.” Messages, videos, and other content can be easily shared between platforms with millions of people in a matter of days.

In Business

1. building a community.

By utilizing social media, brands are able to create an entire community based on their products or services. The use of a particular brand can be integral to being a part of a certain lifestyle, and social media perpetuates that idea. By being involved with the right communities, or making your own community out of a brand (such as Disney), companies are creating the most loyal of customers.

2. Brands Are Speaking Directly to Audiences

Companies no longer need to go through media such as TV stations, magazines, or newspapers to reach consumers. Brands now have direct access to customers by way of social media — they can now find out exactly the needs of the customer much faster and respond accordingly.

3. Social Media is Changing Traditional Media

Traditional media was such that a brand would just post an article and it would reach audiences. With social media and the way information reaches consumers today makes it so that it’s important who is posting or writing about a product. Influencers, bloggers, and Youtube celebrities can all have a much bigger impact on getting a product successful in the market.

4. Brands Can Have a More Personal Connection with the Media

With social media, brands have a more personal and long-term connection with journalists. Instead of a one-time phone call or email for a story or new product information, brands can create relationships with journalists and get them interested in sharing their stories.

5. There’s an Opportunity to Coordinate with PR Efforts

Brands can create some important PR campaigns through social media. Through social media, companies have an easier time finding influencers to work with, other brands to collaborate with, and news sources to feed stories to.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Chapter 6: 21st-century media and issues

6.10.2 Social media and communication (research essay)

Lindsey Matier

English 102, April 2021

Communication is extremely important in today’s world, whether it be verbal or nonverbal. It can take place through many different forms such as through writing, speaking, listening and physical actions. These forms of communication evolve and continue to improve over time. As humans, we rely on communication for almost everything and it is a way of life. Communication has evolved from talking to writing letters to texting or talking over the phone. Every time a new form of communication is brought up and becomes more popular, we have to adapt and evolve to that new lifestyle. Throughout all the new forms of communication and ways of evolving, social media has been one of the most influential so far. Social media has allowed us to create new ways of communicating, such as texting or posting through different apps. It can connect us with people all over the world and give us a platform to express ourselves in ways that have not been possible before. While social media started off as a small form of technology, it has morphed into aspects of our everyday life. Now there are apps for everything from social media profiles to online shopping. While social media and technology itself has evolved, this has also affected our communication with each other and the world. Social media has created a fast track for information in a matter of seconds. It can give people a platform with millions of followers overnight for doing practically anything. It can help people express themselves in new ways and connect with people who have similar interests. The end goal of social media is to make people happy and ultimately make lives easier.

Introduction

With all this being said, it is evident that social media is in our everyday lives and will continue to change. It has a very strong grip on society as social media usage continues to rise throughout the years. Generalizing social media, we are exposed to forms of media at almost all times of the day. Answering the question of what media is will help give a better understanding of social media as a whole. Media can be defined as a way of mass communication. This could include siting in the car listening to ads on the radio all the way to scrolling on twitter. We are exposed to social media less often than generalized media, but it tends to come in greater quantities when exposed. For example, for people that wake up and check twitter it is an instant flood of information with every scroll. Everything from politics to sports to celebrity news is available at the fingertips. The concern is not all focused on the overwhelming information, but also the overwhelming number of comments and opinions. If we wanted to debate or talk about something before social media it had to be done in person, face to face. Now with social media, we are able to fight with people in comment sections on a backup account with a different name and no connection to who we really are. This new form of communication takes away the vulnerability of speaking to people and having genuine conversation, and makes up for it in internet trolls. Overall, social media is impacting the way we communicate with each other and the real questions are: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positive aspects outweigh the negative aspects? Is social media hindering the way we communicate in person with each other? Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life?

Personal Research 

Along with the other studies that I found from the sources I chose, I also conducted my own study to determine more accurate and recent data. I asked students mostly within high school and college range questions relating to social media and communication. I tried to get a wide range of data dealing with social media apps, screen time, and overall communication as a result of social media. I expected to see almost all negative responses about social media and communication. I figured that most people would respond saying that it has affected them negatively rather than positively, but the results were different compared to what I expected.

The first questions I asked had to do with social media itself. I asked questions about their most used social media apps, screen time, what age they were allowed to start using social media, and whether or not they think social media has had a negative or positive impact on them. As expected, most of the social media apps were some of the most popular ones like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. Overall, the average screen time for all apps was evenly split between 4-6 and 6-8 hours, which I also expected. Something that did surprise me was the amount of time spent on certain social media apps. The data was split pretty evenly three ways and all between 1-4 hours. The next two questions dealt with when they group surveyed started using social media. I asked these questions because a lot of the points I want to discuss later in my paper have to deal with age and whether younger generations are suffering when it comes to communication. More than half the people surveyed said that they wished that they had waited to get social media until they were older. Some said that it is not appropriate for younger kids and that it is just toxic in general. Something that I really like that a couple people mentioned was that in reality, social media at a young age is stupid and useless. A lot of people said they wish they would have enjoyed their childhood more and they would be more extroverted now if they had not been exposed that early. The last question of this section that I asked was if they thought social media has had a more positive or negative impact on them. Overall, the data was split but leaning slightly towards the more positive side. The positive answers mostly dealt with being able to talk to stay in contact with people and meeting new friends. The negative answers all related to mental health and feeling bad about themselves. A lot of people said it is toxic and very controlling and takes up too much of our time.

The next set of questions I asked had to do more with communication and interaction with and without social media. I asked questions like how they feel about social media and how it has impacted their communication, their mental health, and if it has made our lives easier. I decided to ask questions like these because I figured I would get a wide range of responses and a lot of people’s different opinions. I started off by asking if people are an introvert or an extrovert to get an idea of what the responses would be like, and 66% said somewhere in between the two. The response for the next question really shocked me because I received such a one-side response. I asked if they think social media has impacted their communication and the way they interact with others and 75% (18/24 people) said yes. This is the information that I was looking for along with the next two questions. The next question asked if they think social media has negatively impacted their mental health and 50% said yes. I also plan on using this as a research question to show that social media can affect our mental health and therefore affect the way we interact with and around other people. The last two questions are similar but the responses were both very good. Almost everyone answered yes to the question asking if social media has made our lives easier. Everyone that answered yes said they think so because it helps them talk to friends, stay in touch with people they do not see as much, and meet new people that they are comfortable talking to. The people that said no also made good points such as it takes over our lives and it is filled with too much hate and cancel culture. I agree with both sides and am very happy that people can feel a positive response especially when it comes to communicating with other people online. The last question I asked was used to wrap up the whole survey and topic. I asked if they think social media has made our generation’s communication improve or worsen. The data was pretty evenly split, and most people gave a positive and a negative. The people that said improve gave that answer because they said it broadens our communication and allows us to talk to people at a wider range. The people who said it has made it worse all said that it is ruining our face-to-face interaction and causing us to lose emotion. They said that some people do not even know how to have a proper in person conversation and that they are too dependent on their phones. Overall, I agree with both arguments that people made but I do think that the positives outweigh the negatives in most of these situations and questions.

Research Questions

The first question I want to ask has to deal with the overall social media and communication connection and has multiple other questions I would like to cover within it. The main question is: Is social media hindering the way we communicate with each other? I also want to touch on questions like: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? The second set of research questions I have is: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication?

Research Question One

Social media and communication have a direct connection to each other and both have a strong impact on the outcome of the other. My first research question has to do with that. My questions center around how social media has impacted our communication, and whether or not it is positive or negative. First, I think it is important to note the changes and different characteristics that come into play when talking about this. Things like age and problems going on in our world can affect our social media usage and communication. While we connect to people on a deeper level when talking to the in person, social media has also given us a newer and more broad way of communicating. The article “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate” by Stacey Hanke, talks about different ways social media has impacted our communication. Social media has become so relevant in our day to day lives and Hanke describes it in a couple different ways. She describes it as information binging and the fear of missing out, social graces and conversational boredom. Within these, she explains how social media has become an excuse and escape to talk to people face to face. Hanke also talks about how even though it is limiting our in person communication, it can sometimes make communicating in general easier, by being able to talk to each other in just a few words (Hanke 1). In another article by Ryan J. Fuller titled “The Impact of Social Media Use on Our Social Skills”, he discusses similar topics to Hanke’s article but also brings up more positive attributes of social media. Fuller starts of his article by giving some statistics, stating that 75% of teens own cellphones and 25% of them using it for social media, and also says that they use 7.5 hours a day using it (Fuller 1). I am glad that this was brought up because it is important to know how much time is spent on social media, scrolling through feed. Next, Fuller starts to discuss some of the benefits of social media. He briefly explains how social media is beneficial because we are able to stay in touch with our friends and family, and share important parts of our lives with them. He also explains how it helps people reach out to new friends and provide themselves with more opportunities (Fuller 1). Overall, I really like that he mentioned these because it is important to keep in mind the vast majority of social media and communication. While some use it for more simpler purposes likes just keeping up to date with what is going on in the world, others use it to make new friends, find new job opportunities, and stay in touch with people. Another topic I find important when it comes to answering this research question is how Covid affected everything. With the pandemic, we were left inside with nothing to do but what was at our fingertips. This pandemic increased social media usage drastically. The article “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data” by Danny Valdez et al, shows extensive research into determining just how much social media usage in the United States increased during the pandemic. They did experiments and surveys to determine multiple responses to research questions and show how much we rely on social media to communicate with each other. During the pandemic, everyone spent more time on their social media and their phone in general, probably more than they would like to admit. The article helps give more insight into this claim. There is the idea that social media was meant as an addition to our lives. For some people, it has become an addiction and a new piece of their life. The article focuses on how social media could be a toxic place and have a negative effect on our mental health. The time period for this information focuses around the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from Twitter, Valdez created a study to determine the mood of people during the pandemic and the usage throughout (Valdez et al 2). Collecting tweets with certain hashtags and during time periods, the goal was to determine how much the pandemic affected people’s moods, and how much they put out and shared on social media. They used hashtags, timeline data, and tweets from different periods such as the first lockdown, different stay at home orders, etc. Given the responses to the data, they were able to determine the increase in social media usage. We cannot determine if this had a positive or negative effect on the people who were using Twitter, but we can infer that social media is becoming a key part of our lives. Not being able to talk to people as much in person during the first few months of the pandemic greatly affected communication, in positive and negative ways. Communication over the phone increased due to the amount of free time that people had and were able to spend talking to others. Contrary to that, in person communication also decreased given that people were not really allowed to leave the house. The next article by Tayebi et al, “The Role of Information Systems in Communication Through Social Media” focuses a lot about how we have evolved over time with social media and communication. They start off by talking about how social networks are like social media societies. They explain it by resembling it to a human society, as it is filled with people communicating, regardless of time or place. They also exemplify other aspects such as emotional support, information, emotions (Tayebi 2). Social media is constantly looked at through such a negative light due to some of the major bad events that have taken place. While it can be difficult at times to look past the negatives, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the positives. The growth of scientific research would not be possible without the amount of information received from the media (Tayebi 3). Without social media and media in general, we would not be where we are today as a society. As mentioned earlier, it is so easy to get lost in the negative aspects of social media and discard the positive ones. Positive parts of social media such as widespread communication and unlimited access to information makes it all worth it. Staying on topic with positive aspects of social media and communication, social media in the workplace has also broken down barriers for communication. The article “A Guide to the Successful Use of Social Media in the Workplace” by Clark Boyd gives insight into how social media has improved the workplace, and ultimately communication and interaction as a whole. Companies can use social media as a form of branding and way to communicate their products (Boyd 4). Boyd states, “Harvard Business Review finds that 82% of employees believe social media improves work relationships. Left to their own devices, your teams will connect and communicate on social networks, both inside and outside the office.” This directly relates to the research question asking whether social media hinders our communication with each other. Social media also helps when it comes to dealing with complaints placed online. By seeing these through social media, it can help the company communicate either with the person or their company the concerns that are being stated (Boyd 9). Overall, it is safe to say that social media has directly affected communication throughout different aspects of our lives.

Research Question Two

My second set of research questions has a lot to do with the future and how we can improve. Questions such as: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? The article “What is Literacy” by James Paul Gee talks a lot about the basics of communication. I find this an important article to talk about before I go into more detail with this second research question. Gee explains discourse as a socially accepted way of speaking, thinking, and acting (Gee 1). It is important to note this because social media has changed that discourse for us. We no longer communicate and interact the same way in which we use to therefore almost giving us a new discourse. Another thing Gee discusses is identity kits. Gee explains identity kits as “appropriate costumes and instructions on how to act and talk” (Gee 2). This relates to social media because there is a certain way we communicate online that we wouldn’t do in person. For example, we use emojis and abbreviations to communicate on social media or over text, but this is something we would not do when communicating face-to-face. There are also some basic well-known rules of social media that follow along the lines of an identity kit. Such as, for Instagram it is a common idea not to like people’s pictures from too long ago. When you say this aloud it sounds like it is not a big deal and silly almost, but for people that use social media it is something that makes sense. The next article is going to focus more on the question that has to do with room for improvement of communication. The article “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media” by Francesca Valsesia, Davide Proserpio, and Joseph C. Nunes involves how we deal with social media and how we react to it. The article has a lot to do with pyramid schemes and marketing schemes on social media, simply due to follower count. Social media has a lot of power over us and the content we see. Influencers have too much impact on what we see every day and this overall effects our communication (Valsesia 1). Social media feeds us information at our fingertips, whether it be true or false. Valsesia is trying to get the point across that social media has no impact on our lives without the phone and therefore, having a smaller follower count is better for our communication and overall wellbeing in the first place. Leading into my next article, social media can have a huge impact on the younger generation. This leads into part of my second research question dealing with the younger generation and their communication. The article “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities” by Jacqueline Nesi shows how social media is a very complex brand of information and makes it complicated for everyone. Younger kids having access to it and multiple devices like computers and phones makes it that much more difficult. There are a lot of positives and negatives for younger kids having access to social media and the internet in general. It has an impact on their mental health and studies show it leads to signs of depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders (Nesi 2). It can also affect their communication and outward identity due to things such as bullying, internet drama, and behavioral problems. While it does have serious negative risks, social media also can bring a lot of new positive ones. Things like creative ideas, humor and entertainment, and being able to explore their identity are all really great positives that social media gives us (Nesi 4). Most of them using it as a way to connect with friends and family and help them feel a sense of acceptance and belonging (Nesi 4). Similarly to this, social media has given a great outlet for kids and young adults to speak out on issues going on in the world. The article “Building Bridges: Exploring the Communication Trends and Perceived Sociopolitical Benefits of Adolescents Engaging in Online Social Justice Efforts” by Mariah Elsa Kornbluh goes into detail about the racial injustices in the world and how they are communicated through social media. Social media networks can help connect kids to different backgrounds and aspects of their lives (Kornbluh 1). Kornbluh expresses how a society only can flourish under civic engagement and being able to express ourselves, and social media is helping us do that. It is helping the younger generation prepare for the civic role that they will undergo (Kornbluh 2). Social media helps play a major role in participating in political movements and bringing awareness to topics (Kornbluh 3). This all is done by the younger generation and would not be possible without them. So, while it is easy to look at the negative parts of social media and how it effects the younger generation, it also brings great awareness to real life problems in our world. This last article I wanted to go over dealing with this research question has to do with the pandemic. The article “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries” by Abu Elnasr E. Sobaih, Ahmed M. Hasanein and Ahmed E. Abu Elnasr briefly talks about communication with social media in higher education systems. Education systems had to switch from in person learning and communication to online learning, which was a struggle for everyone. Throughout the time that this took place, results showed that social media had a positive effect on students dealing with this (Sobaih 1). Students used social media to build a community and help support each other through this rough time. Through these results, proper usage of social media can be shown as a positive result for a new era of learning (Sobaih 1). This is just one more reason why social media can help us improve our future.

After answering my research questions, it has become clear to me that while social media does have negative aspects, the positive aspects outweigh them. Between the articles and my own research, I have enough evidence to prove that social media does effect communication, but in a more positive way. The way we act and present ourselves is heavily influenced by social media and communication between generations are different and can be seen that way. It is important to note the accomplishments we have made as a society with social media and the media in general. It has helped connect families, provide support groups, and provide entertainment in desperate times. Our communication has changed because of social media but has changed and helped us for the better in the long run. Keeping social media a positive place and staying away from the toxic people on it will only help us grow and learn new things about ourselves.

Works Cited

Boyd, Clark. “A Guide to Using Social Media in the Workplace in 2021.”  The Blueprint , The Blueprint, 13 May 2020, www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/.

https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/

D, Valdez, et al. “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data.”  Journal of Medical Internet Research  , vol. 22, no. 12, 14 Dec. 2020, pp. 1438–8871.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail? vid=8&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=33284783&db=mnh

J, Nesi. “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Health: Challenges and Opportunities.”  North Carolina Medical Journal , vol. 81, no. 2, 2020, pp. 116–121.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail?vid=10&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=32132255&db=mnh

Gee, James Paul. “What is literacy.”  Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning  across languages and cultures  (1998): 51-59.

https://academic.jamespaulgee.com/pdfs/Gee%20What%20is%20Literacy.pdf

Hanke, Stacey. “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate.”  Thrive Global , 13  Sept. 2018, thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/.

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=467b825c-34f8-4e47-95df-e5b2b61bbaf4%40sessionmgr4006

Kornbluh, Mariah Elsa. “Building Bridges.”  Youth & Society , vol. 51, no. 8, 2017, pp. 1104–1126., doi:10.1177/0044118×17723656.

https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/0044118X17723656

Retchin, Sarah, et al. “The Impact of Social Media Use on Social Skills.”  New York Behavioral Health , 1 Dec. 2020, newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/.

https://newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/

Sobaih, Abu Elnasr E., et al. “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries.”  MDPI , Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 12 Aug. 2020, www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm

Tayeb, Seyed Mohammad, et al. “The Role of Information Systems in Communication through Social Media.”  International Journal of Data and Network Science , vol. 3, no. 3, 2019, pp. 245–268., doi:10.5267/j.ijdns.2019.2.002.

http://www.growingscience.com/ijds/Vol3/ijdns_2019_15.pdf

Valsesia, Francesca, et al. “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media .”  Journal of Marketing Research  , vol. 57, no. 6, Dec. 2020, pp. 1152–1168.

https://www.francescavalsesia.com/uploads/1/0/5/1/105151509/the_positive_effect_of_not_following_others_on_social_media.pdf

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Lindsey Matier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

Despite what Meta has to say.

W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack.

Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled .”

The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years .

So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health ) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible.

Let me back up. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid ,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.

I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls.

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks

All of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. A fourth group—Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions.

The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial—or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. There was also an essay in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who interviewed me and other scholars who study politics and social media. He argued that social media might well be harmful to democracies, but the research literature is too muddy and contradictory to support firm conclusions.

So was my diagnosis correct, or are concerns about social media overblown? It’s a crucial question for the future of our society. As I argued in my essay, critics make us smarter. I’m grateful, therefore, to Meta and the researchers interviewed by Lewis-Kraus for helping me sharpen and extend my argument in three ways.

Are Democracies Becoming More Polarized and Less Healthy?

My essay laid out a wide array of harms that social media has inflicted on society. Political polarization is just one of them, but it is central to the story of rising democratic dysfunction.

Meta questioned whether social media should be blamed for increased polarization. In response to my essay, Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, pointed to a study by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro that looked at trends in 12 countries and found, she said, “that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased.” In a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman , Mark Zuckerberg cited this same study in support of a more audacious claim: “Most of the academic studies that I’ve seen actually show that social-media use is correlated with lower polarization.”

Does that study really let social media off the hook? It plotted political polarization based on survey responses in 12 countries, most with data stretching back to the 1970s, and then drew straight lines that best fit the data points over several decades. It’s true that, while some lines sloped upward (meaning that polarization increased across the period as a whole), others sloped downward. But my argument wasn’t about the past 50 years. It was about a phase change that happened in the early 2010s , after Facebook and Twitter changed their architecture to enable hyper-virality.

I emailed Gentzkow to ask whether he could put a “hinge” in the graphs in the early 2010s, to see if the trends in polarization changed direction or accelerated in the past decade. He replied that there was not enough data after 2010 to make such an analysis reliable. He also noted that Meta’s response essay had failed to cite a 2020 article in which he and three colleagues found that randomly assigning participants to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced polarization.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. I discovered four. One of them found no overall trend in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and all three reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world.

One of them, a 2022 report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that “liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:

Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures.

The report also notes that “toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.

A paper published one week after my Atlantic essay, by Yunus E. Orhan, found a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side. When affective polarization is high, partisans tolerate antidemocratic behavior by politicians on their own side––such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index.

These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.

Has Social Media Created Harmful Echo Chambers?

So why did democracies weaken in the 2010s? How might social media have made them more fragmented and less stable? One popular argument contends that social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.

According to Meta, however, “More and more research discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber.” It points to two sources to back up that claim, but many studies show evidence that social media does in fact create echo chambers. Because conflicting studies are common in social-science research, I created a “ collaborative review ” document last year with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University who studies social media. It’s a public Google doc in which we organize the abstracts of all the studies we can find about social media’s impact on democracy, and then we invite other experts to add studies, comments, and criticisms. We cover research on seven different questions, including whether social media promotes echo chambers. After spending time in the document, Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker : “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.”

He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating three such documents , researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all. Even partisans end up being exposed to news stories and videos from the other side. Both of the sources that Raychoudhury cited in her defense of Meta mention this idea.

Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol

But researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves. One study of politically engaged Twitter users, for example, found that they “are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.” So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a 2018 essay . Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them.

These closely bonded groupings can have profound political ramifications, as a couple of my critics in the New Yorker article acknowledged. A major feature of the post-Babel world is that the extremes are now far louder and more influential than before. They may also become more violent. Recent research by Morteza Dehghani and his colleagues at the University of Southern California shows that people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous.

This finding seems to be borne out by a statement from the 18-year-old man who recently killed 10 Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo. In the Q&A portion of the manifesto attributed to him, he wrote:

Where did you get your current beliefs? Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.

The killer goes on to claim that he had read information “from all ideologies,” but I find it unlikely that he consumed a balanced informational diet, or, more important, that he hung out online with ideologically diverse users. The fact that he livestreamed his shooting tells us he assumed that his community shared his warped worldview. He could not have found such an extreme yet homogeneous group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.

Is Social Media the Primary Villain in This Story?

In her response to my essay, Raychoudhury did not deny that Meta bore any blame. Rather, her defense was two-pronged, arguing that the research is not yet definitive, and that, in any case, we should be focusing on mainstream media as the primary cause of harm.

Raychoudhury pointed to a study on the role of cable TV and mainstream media as major drivers of partisanship. She is correct to do so: The American culture war has roots going back to the turmoil of the 1960s, which activated evangelicals and other conservatives in the ’70s. Social media (which arrived around 2004 and became truly pernicious, I argue, only after 2009) is indeed a more recent player in this phenomenon.

In my essay, I included a paragraph on this backstory, noting the role of Fox News and the radicalizing Republican Party of the ’90s, but I should have said more. The story of polarization is complex, and political scientists cite a variety of contributing factors , including the growing politicization of the urban-rural divide; rising immigration; the increasing power of big and very partisan donors; the loss of a common enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed; and the loss of the “Greatest Generation,” which had an ethos of service forged in the crisis of the Second World War. And although polarization rose rapidly in the 2010s, the rise began in the ’90s, so I cannot pin the majority of the rise on social media.

But my essay wasn’t primarily about ordinary polarization. I was trying to explain a new dynamic that emerged in the 2010s: the fear of one another , even—and perhaps especially––within groups that share political or cultural affinities. This fear has created a whole new set of social and political problems.

The loss of a common enemy and those other trends with roots in the 20th century can help explain America’s ever nastier cross-party relationships, but they can’t explain why so many college students and professors suddenly began to express more fear, and engage in more self-censorship, around 2015. These mostly left-leaning people weren’t worried about the “other side”; they were afraid of a small number of students who were further to the left, and who enthusiastically hunted for verbal transgressions and used social media to publicly shame offenders.

A few years later, that same fearful dynamic spread to newsrooms , companies , nonprofit organizations , and many other parts of society . The culture war had been running for two or three decades by then, but it changed in the mid-2010s when ordinary people with little to no public profile suddenly became the targets of social-media mobs. Consider the famous 2013 case of Justine Sacco , who tweeted an insensitive joke about her trip to South Africa just before boarding her flight in London and became an international villain by the time she landed in Cape Town. She was fired the next day. Or consider the the far right’s penchant for using social media to publicize the names and photographs of largely unknown local election officials, health officials, and school-board members who refuse to bow to political pressure, and who are then subjected to waves of vitriol, including threats of violence to themselves and their children, simply for doing their jobs. These phenomena, now common to the culture, could not have happened before the advent of hyper-viral social media in 2009.

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

What Can We Do to Make Things Better?

My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” Beyond a reasonable doubt is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the preponderance of evidence. Is social media probably damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our collaborative-review document , or probably not ? I urge readers to examine the document themselves. I also urge the social-science community to find quicker ways to study potential threats such as social media, where platforms and their effects change rapidly. Our motto should be “Move fast and test things.” Collaborative-review documents are one way to speed up the process by which scholars find and respond to one another’s work.

Beyond these structural solutions, I considered adding a short section to the article on what each of us can do as individuals, but it sounded a bit too preachy, so I cut it. I now regret that decision. I should have noted that all of us, as individuals, can be part of the solution by choosing to act with courage, moderation, and compassion. It takes a great deal of resolve to speak publicly or stand your ground when a barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments is coming at you and nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).

Read: How to fix Twitter—and all of social media

Fortunately, social media does not usually reflect real life, something that more people are beginning to understand. A few years ago, I heard an insight from an older business executive. He noted that before social media, if he received a dozen angry letters or emails from customers, they spurred him to action because he assumed that there must be a thousand other disgruntled customers who didn’t bother to write. But now, if a thousand people like an angry tweet or Facebook post about his company, he assumes that there must be a dozen people who are really upset.

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age.

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.

Question of the Week: Is social media destroying communication skills?

By Karina Putman

Your personal answer completely depends on how you view the phrase “communication skills.” To me, the phrase fully connects itself to the simple ability to relay what you want to say in an effective manner, so that another person understands what you’re trying to get across.

Perhaps, the communication skills that I have were not easily spotted in that sentence, but I hope that made a bit of sense. So, depending on your view of the phrase “communication skills”, this answer may differ. I do not believe that social media has destroyed communication skills in any manner.

This is due to the fact that, even if one has lost a bit of their written grammar, a person is still able to understand what you write and what you are trying to say.

Many people may agree with this, but point out the fact that texting is taking the place of phone calls (which, in turn, is destroying communication skills), but again, it all depends on your opinion of social skills and also social media. To me, texting is not social media and it aides in communication.

I believe social media actually promotes communication and is barely destroying anything. Then again, that is just my opinion.

By Alex Ludy

The art of communication is a complex one. Since the first humans began formulating languages millions of years ago, it has been changing and developing in ways that people may have never expected.

Social media is not destroying how people interact with each other, it is just changing it. Many people, especially those who have not grown up after the advent of smartphones and social media, believe that online communication has caused kids and young adults to be unable to talk to each other and become less social.

The idea that kids are unable to be social and talk to others effectively is contradictory to what social media actually intends to do. Thanks to online sites such as Tumblr and Twitter, kids of the modern era are more social than ever and are learning to communicate in new and exciting ways.

These sites have given not only children, but all people, the ability to connect with anyone around the world. This ease of access to new ideas and exciting cultures only facilitates communication and brings our global community together, an exhilarating opportunity that is unique to the time we live in.

Just because the way people are communicating changes doesn’t mean they are any less proficient in that communication. Critics argue that the quality of this interaction is significantly less, but that’s frankly untrue. What is the difference between having a forced conversation at the dinner table and having a seemingly meaningless conversation via text message; at least the latter is genuine.

It seems that often times people who do not understand new forms of communication blame their inability to connect with the younger generation on that new way of interacting rather than on their lack of communication skills. Social media is not damaging communication.

Online and instant communication is still uncharted territory, and while it may pose many questions on how we experience and interact with our world, it is only making the world a smaller place while simultaneously expanding it.

The real problem communication faces today is the danger that comes with the unwillingness of many to embrace new ideas and ways of interacting with each other.

By Hattie Luster

In our technologically dependent world today, people are constantly buried in their social media, oblivious to the real world. This phenomenon results in the hindrance of most individuals’ communication skills. Social media is inhibiting our young population’s ability to communicate.

A large factor of social media that cannot be ignored is cyberbullying. The many forms of social media that surround us today open the door for vicious attacks on individuals without direct contact. Because young people can now antagonize others without facing them in person, the verbal bullying in our society has increased drastically, all while the attacker sits behind a phone or laptop, never facing consequences.

Social media is also hurting our communication skills as it is inhibiting the ability of today’s youth to communicate face to face. Most young people today don’t know how to talk to someone unless they’re limited to 144 characters or less. Interviews are a nightmare for many young people because they haven’t been exposed to real conversations with other people.

Because of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and many other forms of crippling social media, the young citizens of America are going to be blindsided when they are thrown into the real world upon completion of school. I don’t see any reasonable simple solution to this problem, as our world has unfortunately been consumed by an addiction to social media.

By Veronica Sheriff

Shanksville Stonycreek

Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are all prevailing in today’s society. These websites are useful in providing information about friends and family, local and international news, having place to store your picture memories and so much more. As entertaining as these may be, there is a downfall of using too much social media.

Ever since smartphones and tablets took off, so has social media. One in every four adolescents admit being “cell-mostly” internet users according to Pewinternet.org. With all of that internet usage, we can only imagine how much of it is going toward social media.

With the amount of social media being used daily, it’s easy to assume it’s affecting communication among peoples’ lives. Social media has become a security blanket to the users of these internet sites.

Social media has become a crutch, and many hide behind it rather than engaging face to face in a conversation. Because of this, speaking skills are going to suffer. Poor speaking skills impair all of those around. It will make someone who may be highly intelligent seem ineligible in a work environment.

Social media can be a wonderful leisure activity if used in a respective manner, it should not however becoming anything more than that.

By Addie Best

Interaction on social media has become a part of many people’s daily lives — much like the real life conversations in which they take part.

In my opinion, social media isn’t destroying communication skills; it is merely altering and diversifying them. This alteration may not be beneficial for developing social skills, manners, and grammar, however, it does expand communication opportunities.

Unlike previous decades where it took days or weeks for a message to be posted, today, social media offers the opportunities to speedily contact or share information with far-away friends and family.

Also, a well-spoken and communicative teenager could easily also have an online presence with no negative impact on his or her face-to-face encounters.

All in all, social media may negatively impact some aspects of 21st century life; however, communication skills may be broadened by social media.

By Lindsay Walker

Just this morning, I woke up to a Facebook message from a former classmate. While this may not seem like an extraordinary occurrence in and of itself, the details surrounding it are what makes it extraordinary.

The message I received came to me at 2:40 a.m. from Ishimbay, Russia. In the early hours of the morning, I was able to communicate with my best friend, who just so happens to live halfway around the world.

Now, take the story I just told you and apply it to a time 100, 50, or even 20 ago. It would be next to impossible for it to have occurred, but today it did, thanks to social media.

Now, let’s be honest with ourselves, social media gets a bad reputation when it comes to communication skills. All too often, the younger demographic is accused with being absorbed in the many social media platforms offered to them: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter.

The list goes on and on. But the truth of the matter is, social media is not destroying communication skills, but is helping to build and enhance them. For example: when has it ever been as easy as a few keystrokes to get in touch with someone halfway around the world?

Or, on a smaller scale, simply being able to send a message to a group of people to organize a get-together? Before social media, it would have taken much longer to send a letter to Russia or get in touch with each individual person, by which time, many other variables can occur.

Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram also offer communication options. A situation that used to happen to me far too often is seeing something I know someone else would enjoy, but not being able to show it to them, then having to offer a weak description of what it was I saw.

With Snapchat, I can take a photo and send it to the person within seconds, possibly making their day a little brighter.

While social media is often the scapegoat for what are altogether issues varying from person to person, one should keep in mind the doors of communication social media offers before pointing fingers.

By Tristan Wiltrout

Salisbury-Elk Lick

Social media isn’t destroying communication skills, it’s just changing them. Interaction via social media is still interaction between two or more conscious human beings, and nothing about it makes it inherently worse than other forms of communication.

Has social media destroyed direct face-to-face communication skills for some people? Possibly. Still, it seems rare that somebody who feels comfortable with everyday conversation and interaction with other people would become worse at that as a result of using social media.

I feel like when this question is brought up, people imagine four millennials sitting around a table, staring at their phones rather than talking to each other. It’s a pretty common image nowadays, but how often does it actually come up in real life? Do people really stare at their phones out of habit?

Would they talk to each other if they weren’t staring at their phones? And if they would talk to each other, would they be doing it because they really want to, or out of a feeling of obligation? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but they seem important to keep in mind when thinking or discussing this topic.

By Alexandra Davis

Berlin Brothersvalley

In today’s world, technology is at our fingertips as communication with people has never been easier; however, are we losing the real communication skills behind all of the social media? Social media is destroying our communication skills.

I can’t watch TV without seeing an advertisement for some online dating site. Christian Mingle, EHarmony, Farmers Only, Black People Meet, the list goes on and on. The growing popularity of dating sites is one of the many testimonies to the fact that social media is ruining our communication skills.

People are so glued to their phones that they have forgotten how to communicate, or in this case how to go out and meet people. With every new social media that appears, fewer and fewer face to face conversations become the norm.

By Katie Oakes

I do believe that social media is destroying communication skills. For example, when I go to a restaurant with my family or friends, I look around and notice that almost every person in that restaurant is playing a game on their cell phone, texting, or talking on the phone.

People do not communicate by talking face to face anymore. Texting and social media have taken over; it is turning people into zombies. When I was little I would be outside playing or in my room. When supper was ready they would yell to let me know it was done, but now it’s texting, “Come eat, supper is ready.” Why have we let our society come to this?

“Since teenagers spend so much time interacting with their peers through social media and texting, they now lack the face-to-face communications needed to be successful and confident in the work force,” said my instructor Tanis Herwig.

I believe that in the next couple of years, society will be nothing but technology and no one will communicate verbally. We will all be like robots.

By Emma Rugg

I do not feel as though social media is destroying communication skill any more than it is expanding the ways of communication. The world will continue to evolve and advance technologically, whether it can be stopped or not.

Yes, maybe individuals are not developing as many personal interaction skills as they would 25 or even 50 years ago, but social media is allowing us to communicate with people from across the world. There are people that I have met and know from different states and even countries.

In these situations personal interaction is almost impossible, technology and the elements that come along with it. Yes, people could increase their interpersonal communication skills if there was less hype over texting, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites but they are expanding the connections through out the world.

Friends and families can stay in touch even if they are on opposite end of the world. Life will continue to go on and put forth new ideas when it comes to communication but if we keep a happy medium when it comes to both interaction and internet we would not have to worry about losing any skills at all.

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Home Article Social media has destroyed real-life communication

Social media has destroyed real-life communication

PROFOUND communication paves the path for human evolution and growth. It wields the power to mediate conflicts, cultivate harmony and nurture strong bonds among those who possess the skill of effective expression. Furthermore, it bolsters self-image and diminishes the vexation stemming from the inability to convey one’s message articulately. Effective communication serves as the cornerstone of delivering messages and is vital for the formation of cordial relations among human beings. It is through the art of proficient communication that messages are best comprehended, fostering the possibility of peaceful human coexistence. This principle is not a modern revelation; even in the annals of human history, primitive people developed societies through rudimentary communication. Utilizing hand signals, inscriptions on cave walls and primitive material like wood and stones, they bridged linguistic gaps to interact with other tribes. This process gave birth to the formation of societies and communities.

The evolution of communication methods has been a hallmark of human history. In earlier times, it solely encompassed face-to-face interaction, but the advent of technology has revolutionized the way humans interact and communicate with one another. In the modern era, social media has emerged as a potent tool, providing a platform for individuals to engage with diverse cultures, nationalities and people in this age of globalization. Modern communication means offering a cost-effective and time-efficient way to connect with others. They transcend geographical barriers swiftly, benefiting humanity across various sectors such as education, healthcare and employment. These technological modes have ushered in opportunities for self and collective improvement.

While social media communication has indeed catalyzed a transformative shift in contemporary communication patterns, it does come with certain limitations. It has transformed interpersonal interaction into virtual affairs, giving rise to online communities that at times, lack the authenticity of face-to-face gatherings. A consequence of this transformation is the younger generation’s inclination towards prolonged online connectivity which risks devaluing physical interactions and undermines the need for real-life communication in personal relationships.

Additionally, social media tends to divert individuals from engaging in face-to-face cultural and social interactions. The age of internet globalization has fostered virtual cross-cultural connections, potentially reducing the desire for physical meetups with individuals from different cultural and social backgrounds. Consequently, while online communication enables its users to have continuous contact throughout the day, it has also become a source of miscommunication and misunderstanding within and between individuals, groups and communities as it lags in the effective delivery of the message that real-life communication ensures.

Effective communication necessitates one-on-one interaction that incorporates intensity of voice, pitch of tone, body language, facial expression and immediate feedback, all of which are challenging to replicate artificially. Body language, in particular, plays a pivotal role, contributing to 55% of effective message delivery. Real-life communication unveils the full spectrum of non-verbal cues, including hand gestures, facial expressions and shifts in eye movement, allowing one’s feelings, be they of joy or anxiety, to become manifest. In contrast, social media communication often lacks these vital non-verbal elements, making it difficult for interacting individuals to accurately discern nuances. Even when utilizing modern applications like Zoom, the potential for creating artificial impressions remains, as users can manipulate the presentation of their surroundings through digital tools.

The tone of voice in verbal communication assumes a cardinal role. Warm and affectionate tones foster friendly dialogue, while harsh tones can turn discussions into conflict-ridden debates. Social media communication, however, often lacks the precision needed to gauge the tone of the communicator. This is especially pronounced on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, where the tone of voice is absent, leading to potential misinterpretation. Real-life communication revolves around the concept of spending time together, fostering unwavering focus within discussions. Face-to-face conversations create an environment demanding complete attention, forming the basis of healthy dialogue and facilitating conflict resolution. Social media interactions, in contrast, introduce multiple distractions during live arguments, eroding the essence of genuine real-life communication.

Live, face-to-face interaction generates immediate feedback, offering clear insight into the thoughts and emotions of those involved, even when unexpressed. This authentic feedback is valuable during group and community discussions. However, social media communication introduces feedback rife with artifice, undermining the authenticity inherent in real-life communication. Social media communication is bereft of these fundamental elements, rendering it a different form of conversation that lacks the depth of genuine real-life interactions. The pivot from real-life communication, once an indispensable aspect of human connection, to online modes of interaction, has altered the traditional landscape of communication. This transition is not without consequences; social media has, in effect, diluted real-life interactions by depriving them of the essential elements required for effective message delivery. The very platforms that have driven this transformation have also dampened the inclination of individuals to engage in face-to-face interactions.

While modern means of communication are indispensable for navigating the complexities of the contemporary world, a balanced approach is essential. Utilizing social media as a means of communication in contexts that do not necessitate the richness of in-person interaction is appropriate. However, it should not replace real-life communication in contexts requiring precision, such as conflict resolution and interfaith and intercultural dialogues. Striking a balance between social media and real-life communication is pivotal for successful navigation in the modern world. Dependence solely on social media communication poses a risk of eroding the essence of real-life communication, a phenomenon that is increasingly manifest in the world today.

In this era of globalization and technological advancement, the significance of social media platforms for communication cannot be overstated. It has become essential to introduce communication as a compulsory subject in schools, colleges and universities to empower the younger generation with the ability to make informed choices about when to engage in online communication and when to prioritize face-to-face interactions to enhance the effectiveness of their communication. Undoubtedly, social media has had a profound impact on traditional, real-life communication. It is imperative to recognize that there is no substitute for in-person communication if we aim to lead harmonious and peaceful lives, both individually and as a society.

—The writer is CSS Officer, based in Sargodha.

Email: [email protected]

Waqar Hassan

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What Effects Does Social Media Have on Real-Life Communications?

The widespread use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and WhatsApp has changed the way people communicate. These platforms facilitate communication, collaboration, content sharing, and interaction. However, they are detrimental to effective communication between people. Social media has negative effects on real-life communication because it decreases the number of face-to-face interactions, alters the nature, quality, and scope of communication, and weakens language skills.

Social media decreases the number of face-to-face interactions because it is based on virtual communication (Duck and McMahan 43). In contemporary society, people prefer to interact online rather than in person because it is easier and faster. In that regard, they have become more antisocial because of the tendency to spend a lot of time on computers and smartphones. Social media also alters the nature and scope of communication. One of the emerging trends with regard to communication and social media is a lack of interest in talking to one another when people are together (Duck and McMahan 47). In many instances, people focus on interacting with their online friends because it is considered more fun than talking in person. Social media weak communication skills because online interactions do not require the application of interaction aspects such as body language, the other person’s reactions, voice tone, and feelings (Rasmussen 68). In many cases, messages can be misinterpreted as the aforementioned aspects of communication are absent. Social websites also alter the quality of communication because they exclude certain cues of non-verbal communication. Interaction is non-verbal, and therefore, it excludes key aspects of effective communication such as intonations and facial expressions (Sahlin 47). People use smileys and emoticons to express their emotions.

Social media has created a quicker and more effective means of communication. However, it has led to the widespread use of slang and informal language in communication. Many people are finding it challenging to converse effectively in real-life situations because of the effects of excessive use of informal language (Rasmussen 57). In that regard, people’s speech capabilities have weakened. Other effects include a lack of professionalism and the absence of etiquette during communication (Sahlin 83). Research has shown that people who use social media in excess show signs of the loss of manners in real-life communication. The lack of emotional expression in online communication affects the quality of face-to-face interactions. The excessive use of social media makes people seem distant and unresponsive during face-to-face interactions.

In conclusion, social media has substituted real-life communication with virtual communication that is devoid of human connection and interaction. The speed, effectiveness, and ease of access to social media platforms are the main factors that have led to the catastrophic effects of online communication, which is experienced in contemporary society. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter lower the quality of communication, decrease the need for real-life communication, weaken people’s communication skills, and render communication ineffective. Important aspects, such as body language, intonations, and physical feedback, are absent in online communication.

Works Cited

Duck, Steve, and David McMahan. Communication in Everyday Life: A survey of  Communication . SAGE Publications, 2013.

Rasmussen, Terje. (2014). Personal Media and Everyday Life: A Networked Life . Palgrave McMillan, 2014.

Sahlin, John. Social Media and the Transformation of Interaction in Society . IGI Global, 2015.

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Social Networking

How your social media habits are damaging your relationships, are your social media activities causing real-life problems.

Posted August 9, 2023 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Individuals are spending more time than ever on screens and electronic devices.
• How people engage in social media can negatively impact real-life relationships with themselves and others.
• It's important to take steps to manage one's social media engagement and care for important relationships.

We’ve all participated in or witnessed social disconnection in action… people gathered together, with gazes fixed on screens rather than interacting with one another. Screens and social media have become a part of everyday life. Social media , at its best, has provided us with many ways to connect, interact and expand our social networks exponentially. In 2022, on average, people spent 152 minutes a day on social networking … slightly higher than the previous year’s 147-minute average.

Clearly, social media is on the rise. Not just how much, but where, when, and how we engage in social media could be negatively impacting our real-life relationships. Our relationships matter. Our deep connections and close social and romantic relationships with others are key to our happiness and longevity.

What’s the problem?

Though social media has become a part of our regular lives, in terms of our awareness of and our ability to manage the impacts of social media on our relationships—our relationships with the people in our lives and with ourselves—we have some catching up to do.

“Social Media Use and Its Impact on Relationships and Emotions” (Christensen, Spencer Palmer), a 2018 Brigham Young University study , found that: “the more time an individual spent on social media, the more likely they were to experience a negative impact on their overall emotional well-being and a decreased quality in their relationships.” The study also found that social media use negatively impacted interpersonal relationships due to: “distraction, irritation, and decreased quality time with their significant other in offline settings” and that participants reported increased “frustration, depression , and social comparison” related to their engagement in social media.

Driving intimate partner disconnection

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center study , 51 percent of people in a committed relationship reported that their partner is: “often or sometimes distracted by their cellphone while they are trying to have a conversation with them, and 4 in 10 say they are at least sometimes bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their mobile device.”

Besides the disconnection resulting from screen distractions, partners can often feel threatened by real or imagined online third parties, including rekindled connections to former partners, habitual engagement with social media influencers, and habitual use of online pornography . These forms of engagement can lead to insecurities, an erosion of trust, and relationship breakdowns.

Feelings of low self-worth

Although it is not unheard of for people to share their struggles and hard times on their social media platforms, most people present an upbeat, curated—and sometimes highly filtered and photoshopped—that is to say, unrealistic—version of their lives to their online followers. “The Effects of Active Social Media Engagement with Peers on Body Image in Young Women” by Jacqueline Hogue and Jennifer S Mills, a 2019 York University body image study , concluded that comparisons “may lead to increased body concerns in young women.” When we compare ourselves to people with out-of-reach lifestyles, career success, beauty, or wealth, these comparisons can lead to feelings of low self-esteem and hopelessness.

It is important that we build awareness of how our social media habits impact our relationships—with ourselves and the people we care about—and that we take steps to manage and take care of our time, our energy, and our real-life relationships.

7 steps to creating healthier social media habits

If your online life is negatively impacting your relationships…

Listen to what the people in your life are saying to you about your social media habits. Observe their reactions to your decreased interactions.

Build awareness about your social media habits and engagement. Make an effort to track the amount of time you spend online for a week.

Create healthy boundaries around your online activities if you find you are spending too much time on social media. Scheduling brief times throughout the day to engage in social media and silencing notifications from social media apps could be a healthy first step in curbing over-engagement.

Put some distance between you and your devices daily. Go out for dinner, watch a movie, take a walk, or meet up with friends and leave your devices behind.

Prioritize your real-life relationships. Make an effort to stay mindful of how your actions and presence impact other people, and be engaged in person with friends, colleagues, and family members.

Unfollow unhealthy, unrealistic, attention -seeking social media influencers. Social media “models” and lifestyle influencers often present a false sense of who they are and set unrealistic goals and aspirations that can negatively impact your sense of self-worth or the self-worth of your partner.

Seek the help of a mental health professional if your social media engagement has led to feelings of low self-worth or depression or if your social media usage has become unmanageable.

Monica Vermani, C. Psych., is a clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of trauma, stress, mood and anxiety disorders, and the author of A Deeper Wellness .

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

Carol Yepes/Getty Images

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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Social Media Has Destroyed Real Life Communication

• Sumiya Amjad
• October 27, 2023
• CSS Solved Essays

CSS Special 2023 Solved Essays | Social Media Has Destroyed Real Life Communication

Sumiya Amjad , a Sir Syed Kazim Ali student, has attempted the CSS Special 2023 essay “ Social Media has Destroyed Real Life Communication ” on the given pattern, which Sir  Syed Kazim Ali  teaches his students. Sir Syed Kazim Ali has been Pakistan’s top English writing and CSS, PMS essay and precis coach with the highest success rate of his students. The essay is uploaded to help other competitive aspirants learn and practice essay writing techniques and patterns to qualify for the essay paper.

1- Introduction:

• Social media’s pervasive influence has led to the deterioration of authentic, face-to-face communication by fostering shallow, superficial interactions that prioritize virtual connections, resulting in reduced empathy, heightened instances of misinterpretation, and an overall deterioration in the quality of our interpersonal relationships.

2- The current state of evolution and performance of social media

• ✓ Emergence of social media platforms
• According to Data Report, there are 4.62 billion active social media users worldwide in October 2023. This means that over 58% of the world’s population is using social media.

3- Which aspects of real-life communication are destroyed by social media?

• Case in Point: According to the American Press Institute 2014 report, 6 in 10 people reported not reading beyond the headline.
• Case in Point: In a study conducted by Full Wood (2017), young people heavily engaged with social media tend to misinterpret non-verbal cues, resulting in negative social interactions.
• Case in Point: Forbes report: By 2025, AI-generated profiles will pose a significant threat, contributing to the rise of sophisticated catfishing
• Case in Point: A 2022 study by the National Center for Bullying Prevention found that 20% of US students ages 12-18 have experienced cyberbullying.
• Case in Point: In 2019, a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman had been active on social media platforms, where he spread his hateful views and recruited followers.

4- What are the impacts of social media’s destruction of real-life communication?

• COVID-19 Misinformation
• Joe Biden’s false statement of beheading of Israeli children by Hamas
• Political polarization in the US
• Preference of social media communication over in-person meetings leading to meagre inter-personal skills development
• Deals regarding real estate, working with supply-chain companies

5- Aspects of social media which have enabled destruction of real-life communication:

• Easy spread of propaganda and misinformation
• The global social media usage rate stood at 59 per cent
• Amazon, Shopify, Nike, Coca-Cola

6- How to reduce the negative impacts of social media on real-life communication?

• Set time for social media usage
• ✓ Developing digital literacy to distinguish reliable sources from fake ones
• ✓ Enhancing real life interactions through active and meaningful discussions
• ✓ Connecting with people with similar interests rather than the ones with pessimistic approach (social media groups and communities)
• ✓ Utilizing social platforms to improve, grow and develop (recipe videos, fitness inspiration and self-help tips)
•   ✓ Prioritizing real-world social interactions and experiences (field trips, get together)

7- Critical Analysis

8- Conclusion

Communication in real life is the cornerstone upon which human relationships are built, connecting individuals on both emotional and spiritual levels and fostering a sense of belonging within society. Nevertheless, the absence of genuine communication can lead to estrangement among family members and friends, ultimately giving rise to social anxiety and feelings of isolation. This unfortunate trend is undoubtedly exacerbated by the rampant use of social media, which has gradually eroded traditional face-to-face interactions and shifted people’s focus away from genuine conversations, causing a rift in friendships and family bonds. Moreover, the negative consequences of social media, such as reduced attention spans, the prevalence of catfishing, and diminished empathetic behaviour, have significantly contributed to the deterioration of the quality of relationships, social discord, and a decline in interpersonal skill development. However, the solution to revitalizing authentic communication and nurturing healthier relationships lies in mitigating excessive social media usage and curbing addiction. As accurately observed by Naskar,  “There is no such thing as social media; there is only unsocial media.”  This essay will embark on a journey to explore the profound impact of social media on real-life communication, unravelling the complex tapestry of its consequences and discovering pathways to balance the scales of connection and disconnection in contemporary society .

The emergence of social media platforms has redefined how people communicate and interact in the digital age. Not only these platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have become integral to people’s daily lives, but they have also transformed the way people share information, connect with friends and family, and engage with the world around them.  According to a Data Report in October 2023, there are a staggering 4.62 billion active social media users worldwide, accounting for over 58% of the global population.  This statistic underscores the sheer ubiquity of social media in our lives. Therefore, this evolution has not only revolutionized how people interact but also profoundly impacted their cultural, business, and political values.

One of the significant impacts of social media on real-life communication is its influence on people’s attention spans. In the digital age, individuals are frequently bombarded with a constant stream of information, often presented in bite-sized formats designed for quick consumption. This has resulted in a concerning decrease in people’s ability to focus and maintain attention, especially when compared to face-to-face interactions.  According to the American Press Institute 2014 report, a significant portion of individuals, specifically 6 in 10 people, admitted to not reading beyond the headlines of articles or posts.  This alarming statistic underscores the tendency to skim content and seek quick, surface-level information, which is a stark departure from the deep and sustained engagement that typically characterizes face-to-face interactions.

Moreover, the prevalence of social media has ushered in a new challenge when it comes to real-life communication; it often serves as a significant distraction, making it hard for individuals to focus on face-to-face conversations. The constant allure of notifications, updates, and digital interactions diverts people’s attention and disrupts the quality of in-person exchanges.  A notable study conducted by Fullwood in 2017 revealed a disconcerting trend among young people who are heavily engaged with social media.  These individuals tend to misinterpret non-verbal cues in real-life interactions, leading to negative social exchanges. When someone is engrossed in their digital world, they may fail to pick up on important non-verbal signals such as body language, tone of voice, or facial expressions. This can result in misunderstandings, miscommunications, and even strained relationships in the offline world.

Furthermore, in social media platforms, there has emerged a phenomenon known as “catfishing,” where individuals create false personas or AI-generated profiles to appear completely different from their actual selves. These fabricated personas include fictitious names, images, personal histories, and even strongly held beliefs or political views that do not align with the individual’s true convictions. As a result, the camouflaging of identities erodes trust and intimacy in real-life relationships and contributes to the proliferation of misinformation, confusion, and polarization. When individuals engage with seemingly authentic profiles that are, in fact, fabricated, they may inadvertently amplify misinformation, thereby sowing discord and undermining informed discussions.  A Forbes report predicts that by 2025, AI-generated profiles will pose a significant threat, contributing to the rise of sophisticated catfishing .

Likewise, the anonymity provided by social media platforms has facilitated cyberbullying and online harassment.  A study by the National Center for Bullying Prevention in 2022 found that 20% of U.S. students aged 12-18 have experienced cyberbullying.  These negative online experiences can spill over into real-life interactions, affecting individuals’ mental and emotional well-being. Besides, one of the most alarming and pressing issues concerning social media’s impact on real-life communication is its role as a breeding ground for hate speech and extremism. The unrestricted and often anonymous nature of online platforms has provided a fertile ground for the propagation of extremist ideologies and the spread of hatred. This, in turn, poses a grave threat to online safety and societal harmony.  A horrifying example is the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings in New Zealand, where a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people.  The gunman had actively used social media platforms to propagate his hateful views and recruit followers. The speed and reach of these platforms allowed him to disseminate his extremist ideology, ultimately leading to a violent act that shattered lives and communities. Thus, the prevalence of hate speech and extremism on social media platforms has far-reaching consequences. It not only endangers online safety by creating an environment where individuals are exposed to threatening content, but it also contributes to the polarization and division of societies.

The influence of social media on real-life communication has led to a series of significant impacts across various societal levels, including the social, political, and economic dimensions. These effects underscore the complexities and challenges that come with the pervasive use of social media. At the social level, the prevalence of online communication and decreased face-to-face interactions profoundly impact the quality of personal relationships by hindering the development of trust, empathy, and deeper connections. Additionally, negative and polarizing content on social media platforms contributes to social chaos and confusion, sowing discord and misinformation among communities. Furthermore, social media has played a significant role in the rapid dissemination of misinformation, including conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which poses public health risks. Similarly, at the political level, social media’s influence leads to an increase in the spread of false statements and comments, leading to miscommunication and misunderstandings among the public. High-profile figures sharing unverified or false claims on these platforms can have diplomatic implications and stoke tensions. Additionally, the algorithms employed by social media platforms often create filter bubbles, reinforcing users’ existing beliefs and limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints, hindering constructive political discourse and the democratic exchange of ideas. This, in turn, exacerbates political polarization, making it more challenging to find common ground and work towards bipartisan solutions. Besides, at the economic level, the preference for digital communication over face-to-face meetings hampers the development of essential interpersonal skills necessary for effective in-person interactions. Moreover, the reliance on social media platforms for business transactions and negotiations, such as real estate deals and supply-chain management, can lead to misunderstandings, inefficiencies, and economic challenges. These impacts underscore the need for individuals, organizations, and policymakers to address the challenges posed by social media’s influence on real-life communication, including the potential risks to relationships, information accuracy, political discourse, and economic productivity.

The destruction of real-life communication by social media is propelled by several pivotal factors. Firstly, the ease of free access and low cost of social media platforms have led to the rampant spread of propaganda and misinformation, as these platforms serve as fertile ground for the dissemination of unreliable content. Secondly, the wide-reaching penetration of social media among the global population, with a usage rate of 59 per cent, underscores its omnipresence, making it a primary channel for information dissemination and interaction. Finally, the growing dependence of businesses on social media advertising campaigns, exemplified by industry giants like Amazon, Shopify, Nike, and Coca-Cola, has further entrenched social media as a dominant mode of communication. This reliance on digital platforms for marketing and customer engagement has inadvertently weakened the significance of face-to-face interactions and traditional communication methods, accentuating the profound impact of social media on real-life communication dynamics. These aspects collectively highlight the intricate relationship between social media and the deterioration of in-person communication.

To mitigate the negative impacts of social media on real-life communication, individuals can take the following proactive steps. First, individuals can create a balance between online and offline interactions by setting specific times for social media usage, allowing for undistracted real-life communication. Furthermore, enhancing face-to-face interactions through active and meaningful discussions fosters genuine human connection. Engaging with individuals who share similar interests, rather than succumbing to pessimistic online environments, can promote constructive dialogue and positive interactions. Leveraging social platforms for self-improvement, whether through recipe videos, fitness inspiration, or self-help tips, transforms online spaces into avenues for personal growth. Ultimately, prioritizing real-world social interactions and experiences, such as field trips and get-togethers, rejuvenates the depth and authenticity of human communication, allowing individuals to regain control over the positive aspects of their interactions while minimizing the detrimental effects of excessive social media use.

Critically, social media’s influence on real-life communication remains a subject of ongoing debate and evolution. Undoubtedly, social media platforms offer unparalleled opportunities for communication and the swift acquisition of current information from virtually any corner of the world. However, this convenience, when taken to excess, can inadvertently foster a dependency that erodes cognitive abilities, decision-making skills, and intellectual prowess, thereby detrimentally affecting face-to-face communication. While these platforms were originally introduced to enhance human connectivity, their overreliance can result in a pervasive distraction, diverting individuals from their life goals and aspirations. Consequently, the judicious and balanced use of social media emerges as a key strategy for mitigating its negative impacts.

In conclusion, social media has played an integral role in ushering humanity into the modern age, enhancing our communication, productivity, access to information, and entertainment methods. Yet, the unbridled dependence on this technology has wrought significant erosion in the realm of real-life communication. This overreliance diminishes physical interactions, decision-making power, and cognitive development. Additionally, social media fosters superficial interactions and impolite conduct due to deficiencies in verbal skills and emotional intelligence. It disrupts quality time and fuels cyberbullying and unhealthy comparisons. However, balancing real-life communication necessitates prioritizing face-to-face interaction, setting screen time limits, and avoiding comparison-based content on social media can counteract the detrimental effects of excessive social media use.  As renowned author John Naisbitt once wisely said, “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge,” and this adage underscores the significance of preserving real-life communication in our increasingly digital world .

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