Social Media Need friends We can help! Essays - Community Building

Social Media: Need friends? We can help! In the article titled "Technology's Effect", the author Michael Kanters dives into the effects that virtual social interactions have on people, both positive and negative, based on his perspective. Kanters follows a basic form with broad examples that progresses into specific anecdotes. He first acknowledges the obvious problems and most heart warming benefits of social media. Although I agree that social technologies have a negative effect on people in real life, it is too broad and therefore will only be focusing on social media with IO. Social media has more negative impact on an individual's ability to interact with other real people, that such overpower the "benefits" it could provide with its original intended use. The article "Technology's Effect" is an excerpt from a book published in 2010, and although it may not seem like long ago, 2010 was 7 years ago. The perspective on the subject has changed alongside social media itself, for instance "...virtual communities" is no longer in our present vocabulary. Up to about the year the book of this excerpt was published the internet was very different, abundant with many different people trying all sorts of variations of online communities, but "... technological advances [in social Media] cause[d] people to be distracted and increasingly isolated" (Kanters par. 1). When social media is brought up in a conversation people jump into the mentality of one of the four big social medias today: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. All others are just websites. Being part of one or more of the said social medias is "... what it means to be social" (Kanters par. 1) in 2017 standards. With social media monopoly on the rise by the biggest of the four, Facebook, people began to become close minded, often forgetting that their phones can access more than just Facebook. This created what we have in the present, phone zombies, people walking around with their backs hunched forward and faces glued down due to prolonged interaction with their phones . People might be reconnecting with long lost relatives in a different country or talking about personal interest with someone they have yet to meet, but they are missing everything that is going on around them. Although we have social media to blame, a major part of the negative effects of social media on people come from other people. As explored by Kanters, social media was intended to make people share themselves and create relationships, but sometime between the creation of social media and today it was lost. The creators do not care what it is used for as long as it generates money, and the more they make people believe social media will make you acquire friends and feel good, the more people they get on board. People often seek social media as a way of "... overcoming a sense of isolation..." (Kanters par. 9). We are forced to see social media as a way for us to explore the world without leaving the couch, therefore making it all seem so vast and unreachable by ourselves. Giving up to the notion, people often opt to simply skip trying to look for face to face connections and jump straight into what was supposed to be the last line of defense against isolation. Social media makes us put ourselves down. Kanters shares an anecdote about WWII veterans finding each other and becoming friends over shared traumatic experiences, "they felt alone and isolated, but that chatroom [made them feel like] they fit again". They were implicitly told, by both people and social media, this is the only way for you to make friends. They have social media to thank, but is it really worth closing ourselves socially in real life hoping to find people that share one thing with us? Social media brings many positive changes to one's life, but unfortunately it brings far more negative side effects that make finding a friend across the globe not worth it. People did it before us, it is not impossible to put the phone down look around and ask a question to the person on your side that could trigger a conversation. Making connections should not be based