Message Received
Twenty years ago if you wanted to ask a friend to play after school you either sent them a note during class or called their house phone the night before. In today’s day and age a child as young as ten can have a full conversation with their friend on the other side of the globe. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iMessage have made it almost obsolete to sit and have face-to-face conversations. The new technological generation, which consist of anyone born in the 90s, have grown up in a world that revolves around technology. Of course this new innovation has brought along many changes with it. Because we have adapted to this form of communication so much it has become an obsolete and inconvenient task to have to actually sit and have a conversation with someone face-to-face. We have become a society that is completely dependent on our technology to communicate. It is almost impossible for us to maintain our work life and social life without using some sort of modern-day technology to communicate ideas. Our society may look at this transformation in communication in one of two ways either positive or negative. Many see social networking as a positive aspect of today’s world, but others disagree believing that it negatively impacts the way in which teenagers communicate.
Overtime the youth of America has become more and more dependent on social media and technology as a form of communication. Statics are showing just how often teens are picking up their phones to send a text or visit a social media site. There are endless ways to
communicate through social media sites or technology. You can update a status of facebook about how your day is going or send a someone a message, you can favorite a tweet on twitter that your best friend has posted, and of course the most popular you can have never ending conversations through text. Overall, 72% of all teens ages 12-17 send and receive text messages, and 88% of teens with cell phones text. Since 2006, text messaging has increased significantly from 51% of teens who were text users. Between February 2008 and September 2009, daily use of text messaging by teens shot up from 38% in 2008 to 54% of all teens saying they text every day in 2009. (Pew Research) Over the past two decades, technology has transformed communication by making it more and more pervasive. Advances in computer and telephone technology have created an explosion in the ways we can reach each other. For the younger generation this communication is all they know, the foundation on which they were raised. They are becoming exceedingly accustomed to always having someone to communicate with throughout their day. Some would say this is a bad thing because the excessive communication begins to interrupt other aspects of life. Even if a teenager is at home the outside world is able to enter through social media and cell phones and laptops. We live in a world where communication through modern technology is prominent. Everywhere you go, people are texting, emailing, writing blogs, tweeting and using Facebook. It's hard to take two steps on the Long Island University campus without seeing someone using their phone or the Internet to connect with others. Teenagers are spending a substantial amount of time on social media and their cell phones communicating. Older girls ages 14-17 are the most avid texters – 69% say they text their friends every day, while 53% of boys the same age report daily texting.(Pew Research) In keeping with their greater
overall levels of interpersonal communication, girls and high school-age teens ,ages 14-17, interact frequently via text messaging and social media sites with friends and siblings. Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggests many teenagers are spending more than 20 hours a week online, staying up into the early hours of the morning and leaving their mobile phones on all night in case they receive a text message.
There are many different ways how technology may affect society. When all these new forms of communication came into the picture most people focused on the benefits that came along with the new technology but didn’t foresee the effect it could have on our society in a negative way. Although social media has given our society so much technological growth it also took something away. The most significant thing that has been taken away is our capability to sit down and have an actual face to face communication. Society has grown so accustomed to relying on our technology as our main form of communication that most people, especially the youth, have poor social skills. Almost anyone will tell you that it is much easier to just send a text to someone then to have to actually say it to their face.
Another observation is adolescences using electronic media to make confrontation easier and as a result relationship falter. Teenagers are often uncomfortable with face-to-face confrontation, so it's easy to understand why they'd choose to use the Internet. Precisely because electronic media transmit emotion so poorly compared to in-person interaction, many view it as the perfect way to send difficult messages. By communicating through social media or technology it blocks us from registering the negative emotional responses such messages engender, which provides us the illusion we're not really doing harm. Unfortunately, this also usually means we don't transmit these messages with as much
empathy, and often find ourselves sending a different message than we intended and breeding more confusion than we realize. Technology can damage our personal relationships. When we spend so much time on our computers and phones, we lose real connection with others. According to atechnologysociety.com, "we make calls on our mobiles and together send literally billions of text messages every year. We take the availability of others – and ourselves – for granted." Instead of having a pleasant conversation with our family, friends or significant others, we are gluing our eyes to our computer screens. This problem is especially present in the youth of today’s society, knowing from my own personal experience it is as if teenagers undervalue the ability to communicate with those you love because it comes so easily. Another negative side of social networking that is most highlighted by today’s media is cyber bullying over the internet, which mostly occurs on social media sites, such as Facebook. Cyber bullying is defined as the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. Bullies use sabotage, extortion, impersonation, harassment, stealing and other criminal means to harm others, and the effects can be devastating. Although cyber bullying is done over the internet it is definitely carried on out in real life and can affect the social skills of those being bullied. Cyber bullying influences the communication skills of both the bully and the bullied. For the bully it becomes second nature to use aggression and vulgarity to communicate and that carries over into real life social skills.
Social networking also has some positive effects on today’s youth. The first area in which this new form of communication may have a positive effect on the youth is school.
Texting is used as method for managing school work, 70% of teens have used text messaging to do things related to school work, with 23% of teens texting for school at least once a day.(Wright) The convenience of the social networks means that they are never out of touch. This is a positive thing in the eyes of the teens because it’s so convenient and you can just talk to people all the time, and no matter where you are. Another positive is that social networking can help bring the whole world closer together. Technology helps bring down cultural barriers. Being able to make friends with people all over world helps to diffuse the idea that we are all different because the opportunity allows us to see how similar we all really are. Social media can also have emotional effects on the teens using it. According to a report last year by the nonprofit child advocacy group Common Sense Media, one in five teens said social media makes them feel more confident, compared with 4% who said it makes them feel less so. In the survey of more than 1,000 13- 17-year-olds about how they view their digital lives, 28% said social networking made them feel more outgoing versus 5% who said it made them feel less so. When it comes to being social online 29% said it made them feel less shy versus the 3% who said it made them feel more timid. When it comes to relationships with friends, almost 52% of teens said social media has made them better versus just 4% who said it has negatively affected those relationships.(Per Research) Social media gives teens a confidence boost they need which is most likely why they prefer to communicate technologically rather than face to face. With social networks we feel as though our voice is being heard and we can actually make a difference we are able to communicate our thoughts on all different topics .There are a number of options available for us to communicate with others on these social networks.
Social media is altering how and what we communicate, which does have negative consequences as mentioned before. For one it has caused our grammar to diminish terribly. As Twitter and Facebook become more prevalent, people who used to communicate thoughts in complete sentences are using sentence fragments and short-forms. Also people are much more opened to sharing personal information. Because people are communicating so much more, in order to capture the new generation’s attention the content in which people post things seems to be more personal. Teenagers that use social media cite can express themselves and share personal information. It is a lot harder to feel embarrassment over the internet than in person, so people find it easier to vent their feelings through social media cites such as twitter or Facebook.
The younger generation of society accounts for a large percentage of social media users. Usually, teenagers have learned how to build relationships with other people around their neighborhood or school, but over the past decade or so because of social networking, real and hard-earned relationships are now replaced with online interactions. In turn, teenagers are unable to develop crucial communication skills that they will need for situations later on in life, such as building sustainable real-life relationships or interviews for a job. Because people are so dependent in using social media as a way to communicate, they are being preventing themselves from networking offline. In this day and age, with all the technology people are able to log onto social media sites from their phone, which feeds into their addiction even more. A lack of face-to-face communication negatively affects how we interact with others. Social competency is a crucial ideal that most people strive towards, but there is evidence to support the claims that social media is actually harming people’s ability
to interact competently in an offline setting. As more and more people turn towards Facebook or Twitter, antisocial tendencies will continue to increase.
In a lot of scenarios social media can be a positive thing. For example it’s a great way and makes it a lot easier to keep in touch with family and friends, especially if they live far away. But like everything else on earth it is only good in moderation, too much of anything can lead to very negative outcomes. The young generation of our society have a deep set dependency on technology and social media communication which needs to be addressed. The longer we depend on our social media, the more we'll lose one of our greatest gifts: the ability to argue, to disagree, to make mistakes, to be honest, to say what we think, and to take other people's feelings into consideration. In other words, to talk. If we can just turn our phones off for an hour or two and really enjoy the world around us and actually sit and have a face to face conversation with someone, we can live in a world that is balanced with both reality and technology.