social media makes us less social
Answers
There was once a time when people would only communicate in person. Although this is before our lifetimes, human beings once had to actually talk to one another — with their mouths! As the world got bigger, those that we wished to talk to no longer resided in the same village, so we had no choice but to write letters.
As technology advanced, our impatience grew — we no longer wished to wait for the mail to arrive by postman or pigeon, we wanted a faster way to talk with our friends and business partners: hence the invention of texting and email. Okay sure, this isn’t an exact history of our advancements in communication, but I think you get the picture: humans were once required to interact in person, while now we very well may have never even met the person we are chatting with.
With the evolution of communication, human relationships are themselves evolving. We now have the ability to maintain friendships with those we know overseas — an instantaneous correspondence that before was impossible. We now have the ability to stay in touch with our friends and family throughout the day without having to spend the time required of traveling to meet them.
We can call, we can text, we can email, we can tweet or send messages via the endlessly expanding list of applications available at any app store. All of this is for the love of convenience. The less time that we spend interacting, the more interactions we can have and the more time that we have for other things. Unfortunately, what many people are slowly coming to realize is that more is not always better; avoiding face-to-face communication has a huge downside.
Since there are only so many hours in a day, the more interactions we have in any given day, the shorter those interactions must be. In this day and age, we attempt to make such interactions as quick as manageable, avoiding actual conversations if at all possible. We don’t want to meet in person and we prefer not to have to dial a number and talk over the phone.
It is as if we as a society have gotten together and decided that our breath is not worth wasting and ought to be saved at all cost. Having more “free time,” we end up either filling our day with dozens of these “conversations” or filling the extra time that we have left over with pointless tasks — tasks that would be better avoided altogether. Like watching our stories on TV — or rather, on our computers; we don’t have the time to wait around and watch a show when it airs. We watch it whenever we feel we want to watch it via the Internet.
We no longer converse — we share information. We no longer use words — we use textese, using abbreviations and acronyms. We have concluded that people have nothing more to offer other than information about themselves or the world, and for this reason, we see no reason why we ought to spend time interacting in person.