Sherry Turkle and Rebecca Greenfield explore the question on whether the continued use of social media is leading humanity towards leading a lonelier and unsocial lifestyle. My position on this debate is that indeed the use of social media creates an environment where people find themselves experiencing challenges in building their face-to-face conversations. Although I believe in the fact that social media was designed specifically to help in building connections, I tend to agree with the fact that it has not helped in making humanity more social. The use of social media has created a situation where a majority of the young people experience some form of fear towards making conversations. Turkle (2012) points out that, “In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones” (p.1). That servs as a clear justification of the fact that social media is making people, especially the young generation, much more antisocial.
In my personal experience, the use of social media creates a situation where although users are seen to be engaging in real-time conversations, they are not actually speaking a single word. Greenfield (2012) supports this position arguing that, “We chat all day long on Gchat, for example, but aren't actually saying anything” (p.1). The challenge remains that it has become much more challenging to establish a clear approach through which to ensure that social media users, especially the youth would be able to concentrate more on face-to-face conversations. The use of social media technology, as discussed by the two authors, is affecting our sense of time, as it seeks to create an alternate reality that users are able to accept. The outcome is that a majority of the people find themselves spending significant amounts of time on social media attributed to the sense of satisfaction that it is able to give them.
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References
Greenfield, R. (2012). A different kind of digital generation gap . Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/different-kind-digital-generation-gap/329018/
Turkle, S. (2012). The flight from conversation . Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
