Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Deni Ramirez
Communication
Abstract
Social media has so many advantages in which it can be used but people have been
using it in a harmful way and it has been affecting peoples health and communication. The
problem with social media is that when used excessively or in an incorrect way it can have
a bad effect on people. It changes ways in which people communicate with each other and
the way people think and behave. Research has been done on the effects of social media on
peoples communication and the results explain the reasons and how social media is
affecting people. Results have shown that social media is making people anti-social and
that it can cause illness to people. To stop this from happening people might have to stop
using social media to communicate, set the phone to the side and start talking to each other.
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Introduction
There are basic human needs which are food, water, air and now added to the basic
needs is social media or internet. We are now depending on the internet for us to use social
media, it has become a need because we enter a house and the first thing we do is ask for
the internets password. Social media has become an addiction for us, it can be just like a
drug which can consume our time and our social life. As Allison Graham says in her
speech, a research was done on 2001 where people said they had 10 close friends and the
same research was done in 2014 where people said they had 2. What caused the decrees in
the number of friends that people have? There is one thing that has influenced people and is
social media.
The decrees on friends is not the only way in which social media has affected
people, there are disorders related to internet use too that affects communication. This
disorder is called Internet Use Disorder and was proven by the collaboration of different
people in the research Problematic Social Media Use. In this research Bnyai, F., Zsila,
., Kirly, O., Maraz, A., Elekes, Z., Griffiths, M. D., and Demetrovics, Z, show the
There are different ways in which social media is having a negative effect on
communication but first your need to understand how is pushing us further away from each
other? What is happening with people? How is technology dividing us? In what ways is
social media affecting communication? How can we change the effects of social media on
communication? You need to understand and be informed before you make a wise decision.
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How is social media pushing us further away from each other? People think that
social media is a way to bring people closer because through social media, an example can
be Facebook, you can communicate with people that do not leave close to you. This is true
but there are things not seen by people as the simple situation in which people are together
in a room but instead of communicating with each other they are on their phones using
social media. Graham says in her speech that when a person is using their phone in front of
people that means that there is something more important on the phone than the people
around them. Social media has taken us to a point where we do not care about a
us.
Our vocabulary is also changing, social media is also affecting our vocabulary and
we see it normal but we do not understand that is something affecting our communication
making ineffective. When people are texting it is easier to abbreviate word with the purpose
of not having to write long texts and not having to read long texts. When using
abbreviations people messages might be miss understood, loose meaning, or not provide the
point and this is a way in which people get disconnected and may not be talking about
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the same thing and this is what ineffective communication is. People may not see this or do
not think is important because it is just trough social media but it is. Social media is
something that is supposed to help people stay in touch with each other or know what other
are up to but the way people use it is affecting more than it is helping.
To use social media can be something pleasant, it might be something people likes
because they get relaxed and helps time to go by fast but social media can be like a drug,
you can get obsessed with it and even you might feel like you need it. Problematic social
modification (i.e., excessive social media use leading to specific changes in mood states),
salience (i.e., total preoccupation with social media use), tolerance (i.e., increasing amounts
of time using social media), withdrawal symptoms (i.e., negative feelings and
psychological symptoms such as irritability, anxiety when social media use is restricted),
conflict (i.e., interpersonal problems as a direct result of social media usage), and relapse
(i.e., returning to excessive social media use after a period of abstinence) say Fanni
Banyai1, Agnes Zsila1, Orsolya Kira, Aniko Maraz, Zsuzsanna Elekes, Mark D. Griffiths,
Cecilie Schou Andreassen, Zsolt Demetrovics in their paper. Their research also says that
negative outcomes triggered by the excessive use of social media may have a detrimental
effect on the personal, social, and/or professional lives of the users. These negative effects
affect peoples lives because nowadays people do not know when it is enough and this has a
negative outcome in their personal life. It is affecting their personal, social, and/or
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professional lives because of the lack of communication, people forget about the real world
People are losing their ability to remember things by themselves nowadays people
Rousselle in her article, wrote Social media might be causing us to forget the value of
Facebook is going to tell you anyway?. Also, people use social media to congratulate
someone or say happy birthday instead of calling that person and showing your
appreciation for that person. We are depending on social media to be our memory and this
The division
With social media people have the opportunity of watching what their friends and
family are doing thanks to their posts and as technology has advanced, now people can see
what you are doing in the moment you are doing it. The problem is the constant posting of
people, their necessity to tell the world what they are doing and even what they are eating.
As the graph demonstrates, 100 percent of people post something a day and 65 percent
Communication
thing that is important now is how many friend or followers you have but you may really
talk to only a few. As Rousselle says in her article Friend has been transformed from
someone whom a person has a fulfilling relationship with into someone who lurks in the
background of life. People do not have as many close friends as they used to have because
what people value has changed. Friends do not have the same value, people value more the
number of friends they have on social media as Facebook than the friends they have in real
life.
The division between people can feel normal and people do not even notice it. There
are reasons why people are being divided and one of them is problematic social media use.
Problematic social media can be said to be a disease or an obsession because as any other
disease it can be detected with symptoms. Some of the symptoms that were already
mentioned are mood change, silence, and relapse (returning to the excessive use of social
media). These symptoms are causing a division between people because when a person has
problematic social media use he or she tends to be away from people, to be in his/her
phones and feel irritated when he/she is not able to use social media. This division is
affecting communication because people are not communication or interacting with others.
Another aspect of people and social media that is causing a division and affecting
interpersonal communication is people depending too much on social media. This goes in
hand with problematic social media use is not necessarily the same and as problematic but
they are similar. People are losing their ability to remember this, important events related to
their friend and this also might be for having too many Facebook friends. People
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depend on social media but one they are face to face with people without social media they
communication because people are not worrying to keep in touch with people and
There are different ways in which people communicate with each other, there is
speaking, facial expressions, body movements, writing, drawing, eye contact, touching, and
using technology (social media). People have the opportunity to communicate through
technology and have access to social media which was supposed to make our
communication easier but instead it is affecting the way we communicate. As Maura Keller
cites in her paper There has been a shift in the way we communicate; rather than face-to-
face interaction, were tending to prefer mediated communication, Paul Booth says. Then
Keller says Wed rather e-mail than meet; wed rather text than talk on the phone. Being
face to face with someone involves the majority of the different ways of communication.
When you talk to someone in face to face you have to speak to that person but you also use
body movements, facial expressions, eye contact and touching to communicate with
someone. People prefer social media to avoid all these ways of communication or being
Susie East in her paper cites Sherman that says "Before if you were having a face to
face interaction everything is qualitative. You use someone's gestures or facial expressions,
that sort of thing, to see how effective your message is". When people are having a
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conversation face to face they can use the gestures and body movements to see if your
conversation is being effective or pleasant to the other person. In the other hand, when
people are having a conversation through social media it is not easy to know if the
conversation is pleasant to the other person or you do not know how the person is feeling.
Carson Reider asks an important question in his article which is with the shift from face-
to-face conversation, are we missing out on being in the moment or losing the ability to
sense how someone is really feeling as they relay a message?. Then he answers the
question saying that technology (social media) habits have led to a decline in
communication skills in this generations. As social media becomes more common among
people, communication skills are decaying. People do not communicate face to face and
with it, they are losing the ability to understand facial expressions, body movements, etc.
Language (vocabulary) is the main tool for communication and is also being
affected by social media. When using social media and typing messages, people tend to
shorten the message because no one wants to type a lot nor read a lot and vocabulary tends
to be changed. In the Oxford Dictionary it says the language we use to communicate with
each other tends to be more malleable than formal writing, the combination of informal,
personal communication and the mass audience afforded by social media is a recipe for
rapid change. Nowadays people tend to abbreviate words making the text short and this
might change the meaning of what people are trying to say. There is effective and
ineffective communication and while talking face to face or even typing every word you
want to say can be effective communication, abbreviations might not be. In Allison
Grahams speech she says that with shortening, we lose and run the risk of not being able
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to fully communicate and losing our vocabulary equals a potential loss of being able to
express ourselves. Not being able to communicate and express ourselves is a way in which
social media is affecting communication. With social media, messages are losing meaning
Conclusion
People depend on social media trough their day, they are constantly checking their
phones to see what is going on in it. Social media is affecting communication because
affected due to several factors but the most important is that we are most of the time only
concentrated in media. Graham said, we need to look up and see who our neighbor is, we
need to put that phone away, make a human connection and teach human interaction.
People need to take their time to do things for themselves, to interact with others and do
other activities that are not to be with the phone on social media. Lets teach others not to
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References
Bnyai, F., Zsila, ., Kirly, O., Maraz, A., Elekes, Z., Griffiths, M. D., & ... Demetrovics,
10.1371/journal.pone.0169839
East, S. (n.d.). How does social media affect your brain. Retrieved March 15, 2017, from
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/social-media-brain/
How social media is changing language. (2015, December 22). Retrieved March 15, 2017,
from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/06/social-media-changing-language/
Reider, C. (n.d.). How Is Social Media Affecting Our Communication? Retrieved March
communication
http://townhall.com/columnists/christinerousselle/2015/01/31/social-media-is-
making-us-antisocial-n1950924
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5GecYjy9-Q