When is the last time you had a full conversation without the other person looking at their phone? Did you notice or where you too busy on your own phone? Being on our phone is such a natural behavior for us that we feel lost when we don’t have the ability to be on our phone or looking at our social media. And although social media does have some benefits there is no question that it is hurting our social media skills. Because of social media we are devaluing face to face contact, losing a sense of privacy, and losing our writing and communication skills. If we continue to increase our use of social media our communication skills will only continue to decrease.

The main problem with social media is how badly that it has devalued face to face interactions and how it detaches us from the world. Sherry Turkle puts this very well when she says that we are, “connected but alone”. What she means by this is that we are simply detached from the world around us. We can never truly have 100% focus or commitment for the task at hand, because there is that temptation of social media always in front of us. One example Turkle gives during her TED talk is the use of robots to comfort patients in nursing homes and hospitals. This is sad almost unbelievable that somebody would ever have to turn to an inanimate object to find the care and comfort that the need. Somebody should always have a family member if not a close friend to help them through hard times. Because of social media we are losing the ability to have meaningful face to face interactions. Because of my daily environment I experience this detachment first hand. On a daily bases I see large groups of people looking down at their phones, not single person having a conversation.

Another thing that is becoming coming second nature to us is sharing unnecessary personal information in mass quantity. Nathan Miller writes on how teens are more willing to give out personal information and gives the example, “A Pew research study shows 71% of participants were willing to give their home and school address on social media accounts.” To me this seems crazy because this has no effect whatsoever on who you are as a person should not be given out for literally anyone to see. The example shows how the use of social media has led to a loss in the ability to see an importance in privacy. This statistic was taken on teenagers and I was surprised at the numbers even though throughout school that children have been educated on internet safety and the danger of giving out information online. So in the end the only way that I could see this issue being fixed is if the option to put this unnecessary information on your profile I taken away completely. We also see this loss of privacy in situations of employment. You always hear the stories of how someone didn’t get a job because of something that was posted on Facebook. Even if you personally didn’t post the picture, and have no control over who receives it can lead to an unnecessary and unfortunate situation.

The final thing that social media heavily effects is our writing abilities. Lance Ulanoff”s article Why Can’t Johnny Write? Don’t Blame Social Media shows research on platforms such as twitter that limit the amount of characters you can write claims because of the character cap writers learn to express what they are saying better, and has us reading more.  But the problem with this argument is that the quality of the post or tweet on social media strongly relies on the ability of the writer and doesn’t apply to everyone. He also argues that we are reading more, but how does that help us if what we are reading isn’t developed writing. The things that we are reading is texts from our friends and is only encouraging poor writing. In the end communication over social media usually leads to an increased amounts of abbreviations, lack of punctuation, and misuse of punctuation. In Ben Criar’s article The Period is Pissed he explains how social media has changed the meanings of our day to day punctuation. For example the period has somehow become a way to be assertive or to get the final word of a conversation almost like putting your foot down. These interpretations of punctuation are damaging our proper use in formal writing. This continues use of communication leads to a diminishing vocabulary and unprofessional writing and the line seems to be becoming blurrier on what is acceptable to use in a professional setting.

Without a shift in our society we will only continue to see this lack of face to face communication and writing skills decrease. Maybe one day we will be able to appreciate others and the world around us the way our past generations did before the creation of social media, and the only way we can do this is if everybody takes the insinuative to moderate their use of social media and increase their face to face communication. Next time someone initiates a conversation try put down your phone and learn something about that person.