Is Social Media Making Us More Anti-Social?

           🏆"Is Social Media Making Us More Anti-Social?"🏆

 

Over the years social media has grown to be one of our primary methods of communication. As social media continues to grow and people continue to move their lives onto an online database, people are becoming more anti-social.

We live in a world where almost 60% of our hours awake are spent staring at our beloved phones. Ignore the imaginary percentage that I introduced there and just get the idea. Everything that you experience in that piece of the slab is completely virtual. Especially the social network: It's a virtual society.

Social networking is making us antisocial in many indirect and not so obvious ways. Yes, it is true that it has given us ways to reach out to a larger set of people and redefined the way we interact with each other. It helped us to know about how different people think. So here my question to all that Is Social Media Making Us Unsocial? We’ve all heard the horror stories of social media. Problems like cyber-bullying and sex scandals have latched themselves onto the idea of the various social media mediums, skewing their perception negatively. However, social media use has many positives that we are consistently overlooking.

Social media makes us more social. The positive impacts of social media outweigh the negatives by allowing us to engage more with people we know, people we don’t, and create positive changes by a few taps on a screen. Today, we see that people have lots of friends with friend lists consisting of hundreds of friends. But, are they really our friends? More than 50% percent of ‘friends’ on our list are those people whom we have never even chatted with, a few percent also comprise of those whom we have never even seen! According to the dictionary, a friend is someone who is attached to the other living being by feelings of affection or personal regard. Even our pet is our friend though it’s not present in our friend list. I agree that these sites help us to be in touch with our close ones but "people have nowadays forgotten this and they think that ‘this’ is their home". People these days find it easier to chat rather than talk to a person. Often, I hear complaints from my parents, my relatives that I am not giving them enough time. Almost all the time, I am just sitting on Facebook or Instagram, even though no one is there to chat with. All the time, I keep waiting for people but I never realize that there are people who are waiting for me outside this social network world. Maybe, I have even lost a few good friends in order to make few new friends. Maybe, this social networking has actually made me unsocial.

We are so intricately tethered to social media that we have established a psychological dependence on the network because of the compulsive concern of missing out on an opportunity for social interaction. It often results in anxiety and depression because we are continuously concerned about missing out and if we do, we make excuses to reach back. Now, this is very dangerous because the network companies are constantly finding more ways to keep you hooked up on their sites and we are becoming addicted to it. Social media sites have become a significant contributing factor to the FOMO (The Fear Of Missing Out) sensation.

I think one of the reasons that people get easily glued to online social networking is the level of their openness to this platform. People are quite open and free to express their thoughts when it comes to doing it online. For instance, it's easy for a guy to compliment a stranger on her beauty on the internet. But how many have the balls to step up and do that in person? Not even me to be frank. This is the difference between real society and a virtual online society. 

Accept it. I would like to quote a piece -Get off social media. You can do without continuous pings about how perfect others’ fake lives are going.

Yes, it's all fake. You know it. I know it. Everybody does. But still,  everybody continues to enjoy it. On my birthday, I receive a lot of messages on Social Media platforms. It feels okay, but when one of them gives me a call at 12 instead- it feels the best. We can chat for hours with our friends(whether or not that '-' is present) but when it comes to meeting them personally, how long before the awkward silence kicks in? Even when we are with friends, many of us just can't keep away from our phones.

You have to understand the science behind social media and why it keeps you hooked. Whenever you scroll through the picture of your friend or someone who is spending his time, living a lavish lifestyle, your brain kicks into thinking that I wish I could do that same thing.

Isn’t it?

In other words, your brain releases chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters that give you temporary happiness.

Finally, as I had already said in the beginning, social media is supposed to make us more and more connected but it's for us to decide which connections really do matter.

I think it's time we realize how anti-social is the social-network making us. What else can be expected from it? They need us to stick around to their websites/apps 24x7 so that they get their revenue. They are gaining money from your priceless time. Don't let them. Just try once. Cut yourself off from the internet for a week and find the difference for yourself. Switch off your GPS and try asking people for directions. Go visit your loved ones instead of having those long-distance chats. Thrash in and surprise your friends at their birthdays. Or at least call them and wish them. Go Out. Live Real.

Henceforth, I would like to introduce a phenomenon just because of social media, 'Slacktivism' Slacktivism is the practice of supporting political or social causes utilizing social media and is characterized by lesser efforts and commitments. Social causes are what we as humans fight for to make this world a better place. And these causes have been a driving factor in the growth of humans as a race. We are somewhere losing our driving forces behind social media.

In the end, I would like to say that it is not the technology that is to be blamed for making us unsocial, but us humans. We always strive to move forward,  and we will make technology move forward as well. But we can't be blaming everything on it, because it is us who has created technology and we need it. The human race has come so far, just because of one point of differentiation, our ability to socialize. And if we are giving that away like this, do we even deserve to be this species?