Opinion : Is Social Media Destroying our Generation?
Social media is an amazing development, but the level in which it pervades our lives may turn out to be more detrimental than anything else. It it easy to concede the fact that digital media has done wonders to network people into an ascended level of communication. In a way, it has eased our lives from a casual or business standpoint because at the touch of a button we can immediately interact with friends or co-workers alike. When we look back at older movies which depicted technological advances as this utopia of comfortable living -such as Minority Report (2002), Gattaca (1997), and others- we’ve often seen an approach which has encroached upon the idea that technology should make our lives easier and quicker. Life is fast paced in these depictions and every facet of one’s existence is revolved around their interaction with the technology around them. However, rarely do we see these pictures illustrate depiction. Rather we get homicidal computers that want to eradicate the human species. Yeah, this isn’t quite what I’m getting at.
Social media has only ever expanded since the boom of information technology and now more than ever we see an influx of more applications that pervade our everyday lives. No longer can we go about our day without needing to actively connect with some technological outlet. Many workers use technology to get through a nine to five work shift that may require the additive applications of new technology to more efficiently run a business. Yet, we see these cases as other than adults who have never had to live through an adolescence which normalized new media. Nowadays, we have children, teenagers, and young adults who have been brought up through the center of social media ubiquity. Yes, it is just that, ubiquitous. Social media is everywhere! Furthermore, to many youth in our modern society, social media is life. Kids today can’t go a day without their cellphones, their own personal technological pal/tool. Our cellphones, tablets, etc. are always a part of us, going everywhere we go. One can’t even fathom that someone wouldn’t be carrying a cellphone around with them when they leave the house. And now, we see the cellphone pervade far deeper into our lives than just within the walls of our homes.
Going through my teenage years, I was utterly astounded by how infective social media had become in my personal relationship with friends. I have always been an avid supporter in healthy face to face interaction when speaking to another person. I always appreciated the level of effectiveness that technology had allowed for people to communicate when away. But, when friends hung out, I thought that well…we should actually have hung out.
Picture this and tell me that you haven’t experienced this before. You sit down at a table, ready to grab a meal with a friend(s) and the first thing that you see if the whole gang whip out their phones and enter into a wicked period of zero talking but a hundred percent tapping. Maybe there’ll be an occasional interjection here and there, but the entirety of the conversation had shifted into checking one’s social media…or not even that. People go through their phones because it is just so natural for them now. And as more modes of social media become public, the more our generation finds itself acting upon the phenomenon of “media-switching”; a concept which effectively creates different meanings of communication between different media to create different vibes and ambiances depending on what you’re using.
We have bred a generation of young people who have the attention span of a puppy, and this is a problem…especially in our education. If students can’t focus, concentrate, and develop an efficacy of learning, then we are doing nothing more than allowing a generation to become tainted by inefficient habits of multi-tasking.
Of course I understand the negative bias that this opinion may be taking, and I concede the fact that social media has allowed for us to develop “different” modes of communication, yet I find our current trends of social media addiction to be perturbing, and I think that the rest of our society should be too.
