social media is destroying our communication skills essay

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Smartphones Are Killing Conversation

What happens when we become too dependent on our mobile phones? According to MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, author of the new book Reclaiming Conversation , we lose our ability to have deeper, more spontaneous conversations with others, changing the nature of our social interactions in alarming ways.

Turkle has spent the last 20 years studying the impacts of technology on how we behave alone and in groups. Though initially excited by technology’s potential to transform society for the better, she has become increasingly worried about how new technologies, cell phones in particular, are eroding the social fabric of our communities.

In her previous book, the bestselling Alone Together , she articulated her fears that technology was making us feel more and more isolated, even as it promised to make us more connected. Since that book came out in 2012, technology has become even more ubiquitous and entwined with our modern existence. Reclaiming Conversation is Turkle’s call to take a closer look at the social effects of cell phones and to re-sanctify the role of conversation in our everyday lives in order to preserve our capacity for empathy , introspection, creativity, and intimacy.

I interviewed Turkle by phone to talk about her book and some of the questions it raises. Here is an edited version of our conversation.

Jill Suttie: Your new book warns that cell phones and other portable communication technology are killing the art of conversation. Why did you want to focus on conversation, specifically?

Sherry Turkle: Because conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do. It’s where empathy is born, where intimacy is born—because of eye contact, because we can hear the tones of another person’s voice, sense their body movements, sense their presence. It’s where we learn about other people. But, without meaning to, without having made a plan, we’ve actually moved away from conversation in a way that my research was showing is hurting us.

JS: How are cell phones and other technologies hurting us?

ST: Eighty-nine percent of Americans say that during their last social interaction, they took out a phone, and 82 percent said that it deteriorated the conversation they were in. Basically, we’re doing something that we know is hurting our interactions.

I’ll point to a study. If you put a cell phone into a social interaction, it does two things: First, it decreases the quality of what you talk about, because you talk about things where you wouldn’t mind being interrupted, which makes sense, and, secondly, it decreases the empathic connection that people feel toward each other.

So, even something as simple as going to lunch and putting a cell phone on the table decreases the emotional importance of what people are willing to talk about, and it decreases the connection that the two people feel toward one another. If you multiply that by all of the times you have a cell phone on the table when you have coffee with someone or are at breakfast with your child or are talking with your partner about how you’re feeling, we’re doing this to each other 10, 20, 30 times a day.

JS: So, why are humans so vulnerable to the allure of the cell phone, if it’s actually hurting our interactions?

ST: Cell phones make us promises that are like gifts from a benevolent genie—that we will never have to be alone, that we will never be bored, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be, and that we can multitask, which is perhaps the most seductive of all. That ability to put your attention wherever you want it to be has become the thing people want most in their social interactions—that feeling that you don’t have to commit yourself 100 percent and you can avoid the terror that there will be a moment in an interaction when you’ll be bored.

Actually allowing yourself a moment of boredom is crucial to human interaction and it’s crucial to your brain as well. When you’re bored, your brain isn’t bored at all—it’s replenishing itself, and it needs that down time.

We’re very susceptible to cell phones, and we even get a neurochemical high from the constant stimulation that our phones give us.

I’ve spent the last 20 years studying how compelling technology is, but you know what? We can still change. We can use our phones in ways that are better for our kids, our families, our work, and ourselves. It’s the wrong analogy to say we’re addicted to our technology. It’s not heroin.

JS: One thing that struck me in your book was that many people who you interviewed talked about the benefits of handling conflict or difficult emotional issues online. They said they could be more careful with their responses and help decrease interpersonal tensions. That seems like a good thing. What’s the problem with that idea?

ST: It was a big surprise when I did the research for my book to learn how many people want to dial down fighting or dealing with difficult emotional issues with a partner or with their children by doing it online.

But let’s take the child example. If you do that with your child, if you only deal with them in this controlled way, you are basically playing into your child’s worst fear—that their truth, their rage, their unedited feelings, are something that you can’t handle. And that’s exactly what a parent shouldn’t be saying to a child. Your child doesn’t need to hear that you can’t take and accept and honor the intensity of their feelings.

People need to share their emotions—I feel very strongly about this. I understand why people avoid conflict, but people who use this method end up with children who think that the things they feel aren’t OK. There’s a variant of this, which is interesting, where parents give their children robots to talk to or want their children to talk to Siri, because somehow that will be a safer place to get out their feelings. Again, that’s exactly what your child doesn’t need.

JS: Some studies seem to show that increased social media use actually increases social interaction offline. I wonder how this squares with your thesis?

ST: How I interpret that data is that if you’re a social person, a socially active person, your use of social media becomes part of your social profile. And I think that’s great. My book is not anti-technology; it’s pro-conversation. So, if you find that your use of social media increases your number of face-to-face conversations, then I’m 100 percent for it.

Another person who might be helped by social media is someone who uses it for taking baby steps toward meeting people for face-to-face conversations. If you’re that kind of person, I’m totally supportive. 

I’m more concerned about people for whom social media becomes a kind of substitute, who literally post something on Facebook and just sit there and watch whether they get 100 likes on their picture, whose self-worth and focus becomes dictated by how they are accepted, wanted, and desired by social media.

And I’m concerned about the many other situations in which you and I are talking at a dinner party with six other people, and everyone is texting at the meal and applying the “three-person rule”—that three people have to have their heads up before anyone feels it’s safe to put their head down to text. In this situation, where everyone is both paying attention and not paying attention, you end up with nobody talking about what’s really on their minds in any serious, significant way, and we end up with trivial conversations, not feeling connected to one another.

JS: You also write about how conversation affects the workplace environment. Aren’t conversations just distractions to getting work done? Why support conversation at work?

More on Technology

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ST: In the workplace, you need to create sacred spaces for conversation because, number one, conversation actually increases the bottom line. All the studies show that when people are allowed to talk to each other, they do better—they’re more collaborative, they’re more creative, they get more done.

It’s very important for companies to make space for conversation in the workplace. But if a manager doesn’t model to employees that it’s OK to be off of their email in order to have conversation, nothing is going to get accomplished. I went to one workplace that had cappuccino machines every 10 feet and tables the right size for conversation, where everything was built for conversation. But people were feeling that the most important way to show devotion to the company was answering their email immediately. You can’t have conversation if you have to be constantly on your email. Some of the people I interviewed were terrified to be away from their phones. That translates into bringing your cell phone to breakfast and not having breakfast with your kids.

JS: If technology is so ubiquitous yet problematic, what recommendations do you make for keeping it at a manageable level without getting so hooked?

ST: The path ahead is not a path where we do without technology, but of living in greater harmony with it. Among the first steps I see is to create sacred spaces—the kitchen, the dining room, the car—that are device-free and set aside for conversation. When you have lunch with a friend or colleague or family member, don’t put a phone on the table between you. Make meals a time when you are there to listen and be heard.

When we move in and out of conversations with our friends in the room and all the people we can reach on our phones, we miss out on the kinds of conversations where empathy is born and intimacy thrives. I met a wise college junior who spoke about the “seven-minute rule”: It takes seven minutes to know if a conversation is going to be interesting. And she admitted that she rarely was willing to put in her seven minutes. At the first “lull,” she went to her phone. But it’s when we stumble, hesitate, and have those “lulls” that we reveal ourselves most to each other.

So allow for those human moments, accept that life is not a steady “feed,” and learn to savor the pace of conversation—for empathy, for community, for creativity.

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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How Has Social Media Affected Communication: Facts that Surprise!

Updated: February 28, 2024

Published: April 4, 2020

It’s no surprise that the widespread use of social media for communicating ideas, personal and professional stories and experiences has had a profound effect on the overall way people communicate today. Just how has social media affected communication, you ask? In more ways than you may think! But not all are bad — just look at our list of social media effects on communication.

What is Social Media?

Social media can be described as the collection of online platforms that involve sharing and collaborating with an online community by posting, commenting, and interacting with one another. The most commonly used social media platforms today are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

Photo by  Tracy Le Blanc  from  Pexels

Social media effects on communication.

Around 3 billion people use social media today, which means that 40% of the world uses social media for communication. It’s no surprise that this widespread use has social media effects on communication.

11% of adults reported preferring staying home on Facebook than going out on the weekend. Communication is affected in ways such as personal expression, our expectations of others, and the way companies communicate with customers.

Exposure to Messaging

Information overload.

Many people tend to binge on social media, spending hours and hours scrolling though sites. Ultimately, this may lead to a constant craving of more internet and more social media consumption. The more people get, the more they want — and it’s hard to stop the cycle.

Photo by  Kaboompics .com  from  Pexels

Young people read news.

Social media has made reading the news cool again. According to Wibbitz, 23% of young users get news from social media , and a whopping 61% get political news from Facebook . On social media, people share interesting news they read, and they can follow various news sources’ pages.

Getting the Full Picture

Stories — a part of Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook — mean that people get the full picture of an event, activity, or occurrence in someone’s life. We no longer just get a snapshot of a home-cooked meal, we might see the entire process from start to finish.

This has changed the way people think about what to post — there is much less thought put into a post when it is a story that will be erased after 24 hours.

Boredom in Conversation

Here’s a sad social media effect on communication. We are becoming bored when we have real, in-person conversations. People have such a need for social media consumption and that instant, colorful feedback only social media can give, they will often become bored during real conversations, resorting to their phones. This can lead to a decrease in the quality and number of meaningful conversations.

Reactions to Non-Verbal, Emotional, and Social Cues

In-person reactions to non-verbal, emotional, or social cues are changing in that people don’t need to respond to these types of communication when they are online. This leads to less experience and awareness of others’ needs based on these types of cues that can only be received from in-person communication.

Self Expression

Sense of urgency.

No one has to wait for longer than a few hours for a response, and people have come to expect that timeline for conversations. There is so much of a sense of urgency that people are often anxious if they haven’t heard back from a family member, friend, or partner in a number of hours.

Photo by  Cristian Dina  from  Pexels

Need to share.

Social media has created a feeling among users that they must share whatever they are doing — from restaurant orders, to concerts, to the books they are reading. This can be a social media positive effect because people are getting more exposure to things they might not otherwise, such as new reads. But it can also be a negative effect as it can urge people to become dependent on posting anything occurring in their own lives and painting those occurrences as rosier than they truly are.

Photo by  Vinicius Wiesehofer  from  Pexels

How we value ourselves.

When people see others having a wonderful life, as represented on social media, they tend to have a negative self-image, and start to devalue their own ways of life. In addition, there is a feeling of needing to paint an inaccurately positive and ‘fun’ version of one’s own life which leads to feelings of negativity about one’s ‘real’ life.

Inside Perspective of Afar

One of the positive effects of social media is the ability to get an intimate view of other cultures and places. With social media, especially on Instagram, users are able to see what others are doing around the world. People are exposed to travel ideas, new cultures, and ways of life unlike before.

Broadcasting Live

Broadcasting live started as a fun, innocent idea to share life’s moments, but it’s transformed to become a large part of political movements, sharing some dark aspects of today’s society. The option to post live videos has created an important platform for serious issues that need to be spoken about.

Personalized Digital Messages

Both Instagram and Snapchat have popularized the highly personalized message. People can now completely change their own faces with selfie filters, or draw pictures to send to friends, and more. Creativity soars, which is a great thing, but people can start to spend too much time personalizing picture messages.

Communication Style

1. summarized writing.

Starting with the limited character text messaging of the 2000s, and nowadays with the 140-character tweet, messages have been getting shorter and more concise. Other areas of communication have adapted for summarized writing as well, such as in shortened work memos, shortened academic communication between students and professors, and shortened messages in advertising.

2. Abbreviations

The abbreviated style of communicating that became popular when text messaging started in the 00’s has continued into online conversations. It has also made its way into traditionally non-abbreviated forms of communication such as spoken language, email communication, and even academic forms of writing. This has caused concern among some academics, citing studies that show a causation between “textese” and negative effects on literacy skills such as writing skills and reading accuracy. Other studies show that using “textese” has no effect on spelling ability, or correct grammar use. For a full review of related studies, see this meta-analysis .

3. Unfiltered Interactions

Social media and internet interactions offer a veil between the person sending and the person receiving the message. These interactions are no longer face to face, and this can lead to some unfiltered conversations as people feel they can say anything with no repercussions.

4. GIFs and Emojis

5. Viral Messages

That quick and easy “share” button on so many social media platforms has led to the phenomenon of “going viral.” Messages, videos, and other content can be easily shared between platforms with millions of people in a matter of days.

In Business

1. building a community.

By utilizing social media, brands are able to create an entire community based on their products or services. The use of a particular brand can be integral to being a part of a certain lifestyle, and social media perpetuates that idea. By being involved with the right communities, or making your own community out of a brand (such as Disney), companies are creating the most loyal of customers.

2. Brands Are Speaking Directly to Audiences

Companies no longer need to go through media such as TV stations, magazines, or newspapers to reach consumers. Brands now have direct access to customers by way of social media — they can now find out exactly the needs of the customer much faster and respond accordingly.

3. Social Media is Changing Traditional Media

Traditional media was such that a brand would just post an article and it would reach audiences. With social media and the way information reaches consumers today makes it so that it’s important who is posting or writing about a product. Influencers, bloggers, and Youtube celebrities can all have a much bigger impact on getting a product successful in the market.

4. Brands Can Have a More Personal Connection with the Media

With social media, brands have a more personal and long-term connection with journalists. Instead of a one-time phone call or email for a story or new product information, brands can create relationships with journalists and get them interested in sharing their stories.

5. There’s an Opportunity to Coordinate with PR Efforts

Brands can create some important PR campaigns through social media. Through social media, companies have an easier time finding influencers to work with, other brands to collaborate with, and news sources to feed stories to.

Stay in Touch

At University of the People , we love to create online relationships with our students and supporters through social media. We are active on Facebook , Instagram , and Twitter — follow us to keep up to date with what we’re up to!

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Chapter 6: 21st-century media and issues

6.10.2 Social media and communication (research essay)

Lindsey Matier

English 102, April 2021

Communication is extremely important in today’s world, whether it be verbal or nonverbal. It can take place through many different forms such as through writing, speaking, listening and physical actions. These forms of communication evolve and continue to improve over time. As humans, we rely on communication for almost everything and it is a way of life. Communication has evolved from talking to writing letters to texting or talking over the phone. Every time a new form of communication is brought up and becomes more popular, we have to adapt and evolve to that new lifestyle. Throughout all the new forms of communication and ways of evolving, social media has been one of the most influential so far. Social media has allowed us to create new ways of communicating, such as texting or posting through different apps. It can connect us with people all over the world and give us a platform to express ourselves in ways that have not been possible before. While social media started off as a small form of technology, it has morphed into aspects of our everyday life. Now there are apps for everything from social media profiles to online shopping. While social media and technology itself has evolved, this has also affected our communication with each other and the world. Social media has created a fast track for information in a matter of seconds. It can give people a platform with millions of followers overnight for doing practically anything. It can help people express themselves in new ways and connect with people who have similar interests. The end goal of social media is to make people happy and ultimately make lives easier.

Introduction

With all this being said, it is evident that social media is in our everyday lives and will continue to change. It has a very strong grip on society as social media usage continues to rise throughout the years. Generalizing social media, we are exposed to forms of media at almost all times of the day. Answering the question of what media is will help give a better understanding of social media as a whole. Media can be defined as a way of mass communication. This could include siting in the car listening to ads on the radio all the way to scrolling on twitter. We are exposed to social media less often than generalized media, but it tends to come in greater quantities when exposed. For example, for people that wake up and check twitter it is an instant flood of information with every scroll. Everything from politics to sports to celebrity news is available at the fingertips. The concern is not all focused on the overwhelming information, but also the overwhelming number of comments and opinions. If we wanted to debate or talk about something before social media it had to be done in person, face to face. Now with social media, we are able to fight with people in comment sections on a backup account with a different name and no connection to who we really are. This new form of communication takes away the vulnerability of speaking to people and having genuine conversation, and makes up for it in internet trolls. Overall, social media is impacting the way we communicate with each other and the real questions are: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positive aspects outweigh the negative aspects? Is social media hindering the way we communicate in person with each other? Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life?

Personal Research 

Along with the other studies that I found from the sources I chose, I also conducted my own study to determine more accurate and recent data. I asked students mostly within high school and college range questions relating to social media and communication. I tried to get a wide range of data dealing with social media apps, screen time, and overall communication as a result of social media. I expected to see almost all negative responses about social media and communication. I figured that most people would respond saying that it has affected them negatively rather than positively, but the results were different compared to what I expected.

The first questions I asked had to do with social media itself. I asked questions about their most used social media apps, screen time, what age they were allowed to start using social media, and whether or not they think social media has had a negative or positive impact on them. As expected, most of the social media apps were some of the most popular ones like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. Overall, the average screen time for all apps was evenly split between 4-6 and 6-8 hours, which I also expected. Something that did surprise me was the amount of time spent on certain social media apps. The data was split pretty evenly three ways and all between 1-4 hours. The next two questions dealt with when they group surveyed started using social media. I asked these questions because a lot of the points I want to discuss later in my paper have to deal with age and whether younger generations are suffering when it comes to communication. More than half the people surveyed said that they wished that they had waited to get social media until they were older. Some said that it is not appropriate for younger kids and that it is just toxic in general. Something that I really like that a couple people mentioned was that in reality, social media at a young age is stupid and useless. A lot of people said they wish they would have enjoyed their childhood more and they would be more extroverted now if they had not been exposed that early. The last question of this section that I asked was if they thought social media has had a more positive or negative impact on them. Overall, the data was split but leaning slightly towards the more positive side. The positive answers mostly dealt with being able to talk to stay in contact with people and meeting new friends. The negative answers all related to mental health and feeling bad about themselves. A lot of people said it is toxic and very controlling and takes up too much of our time.

The next set of questions I asked had to do more with communication and interaction with and without social media. I asked questions like how they feel about social media and how it has impacted their communication, their mental health, and if it has made our lives easier. I decided to ask questions like these because I figured I would get a wide range of responses and a lot of people’s different opinions. I started off by asking if people are an introvert or an extrovert to get an idea of what the responses would be like, and 66% said somewhere in between the two. The response for the next question really shocked me because I received such a one-side response. I asked if they think social media has impacted their communication and the way they interact with others and 75% (18/24 people) said yes. This is the information that I was looking for along with the next two questions. The next question asked if they think social media has negatively impacted their mental health and 50% said yes. I also plan on using this as a research question to show that social media can affect our mental health and therefore affect the way we interact with and around other people. The last two questions are similar but the responses were both very good. Almost everyone answered yes to the question asking if social media has made our lives easier. Everyone that answered yes said they think so because it helps them talk to friends, stay in touch with people they do not see as much, and meet new people that they are comfortable talking to. The people that said no also made good points such as it takes over our lives and it is filled with too much hate and cancel culture. I agree with both sides and am very happy that people can feel a positive response especially when it comes to communicating with other people online. The last question I asked was used to wrap up the whole survey and topic. I asked if they think social media has made our generation’s communication improve or worsen. The data was pretty evenly split, and most people gave a positive and a negative. The people that said improve gave that answer because they said it broadens our communication and allows us to talk to people at a wider range. The people who said it has made it worse all said that it is ruining our face-to-face interaction and causing us to lose emotion. They said that some people do not even know how to have a proper in person conversation and that they are too dependent on their phones. Overall, I agree with both arguments that people made but I do think that the positives outweigh the negatives in most of these situations and questions.

Research Questions

The first question I want to ask has to deal with the overall social media and communication connection and has multiple other questions I would like to cover within it. The main question is: Is social media hindering the way we communicate with each other? I also want to touch on questions like: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? The second set of research questions I have is: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication?

Research Question One

Social media and communication have a direct connection to each other and both have a strong impact on the outcome of the other. My first research question has to do with that. My questions center around how social media has impacted our communication, and whether or not it is positive or negative. First, I think it is important to note the changes and different characteristics that come into play when talking about this. Things like age and problems going on in our world can affect our social media usage and communication. While we connect to people on a deeper level when talking to the in person, social media has also given us a newer and more broad way of communicating. The article “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate” by Stacey Hanke, talks about different ways social media has impacted our communication. Social media has become so relevant in our day to day lives and Hanke describes it in a couple different ways. She describes it as information binging and the fear of missing out, social graces and conversational boredom. Within these, she explains how social media has become an excuse and escape to talk to people face to face. Hanke also talks about how even though it is limiting our in person communication, it can sometimes make communicating in general easier, by being able to talk to each other in just a few words (Hanke 1). In another article by Ryan J. Fuller titled “The Impact of Social Media Use on Our Social Skills”, he discusses similar topics to Hanke’s article but also brings up more positive attributes of social media. Fuller starts of his article by giving some statistics, stating that 75% of teens own cellphones and 25% of them using it for social media, and also says that they use 7.5 hours a day using it (Fuller 1). I am glad that this was brought up because it is important to know how much time is spent on social media, scrolling through feed. Next, Fuller starts to discuss some of the benefits of social media. He briefly explains how social media is beneficial because we are able to stay in touch with our friends and family, and share important parts of our lives with them. He also explains how it helps people reach out to new friends and provide themselves with more opportunities (Fuller 1). Overall, I really like that he mentioned these because it is important to keep in mind the vast majority of social media and communication. While some use it for more simpler purposes likes just keeping up to date with what is going on in the world, others use it to make new friends, find new job opportunities, and stay in touch with people. Another topic I find important when it comes to answering this research question is how Covid affected everything. With the pandemic, we were left inside with nothing to do but what was at our fingertips. This pandemic increased social media usage drastically. The article “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data” by Danny Valdez et al, shows extensive research into determining just how much social media usage in the United States increased during the pandemic. They did experiments and surveys to determine multiple responses to research questions and show how much we rely on social media to communicate with each other. During the pandemic, everyone spent more time on their social media and their phone in general, probably more than they would like to admit. The article helps give more insight into this claim. There is the idea that social media was meant as an addition to our lives. For some people, it has become an addiction and a new piece of their life. The article focuses on how social media could be a toxic place and have a negative effect on our mental health. The time period for this information focuses around the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from Twitter, Valdez created a study to determine the mood of people during the pandemic and the usage throughout (Valdez et al 2). Collecting tweets with certain hashtags and during time periods, the goal was to determine how much the pandemic affected people’s moods, and how much they put out and shared on social media. They used hashtags, timeline data, and tweets from different periods such as the first lockdown, different stay at home orders, etc. Given the responses to the data, they were able to determine the increase in social media usage. We cannot determine if this had a positive or negative effect on the people who were using Twitter, but we can infer that social media is becoming a key part of our lives. Not being able to talk to people as much in person during the first few months of the pandemic greatly affected communication, in positive and negative ways. Communication over the phone increased due to the amount of free time that people had and were able to spend talking to others. Contrary to that, in person communication also decreased given that people were not really allowed to leave the house. The next article by Tayebi et al, “The Role of Information Systems in Communication Through Social Media” focuses a lot about how we have evolved over time with social media and communication. They start off by talking about how social networks are like social media societies. They explain it by resembling it to a human society, as it is filled with people communicating, regardless of time or place. They also exemplify other aspects such as emotional support, information, emotions (Tayebi 2). Social media is constantly looked at through such a negative light due to some of the major bad events that have taken place. While it can be difficult at times to look past the negatives, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the positives. The growth of scientific research would not be possible without the amount of information received from the media (Tayebi 3). Without social media and media in general, we would not be where we are today as a society. As mentioned earlier, it is so easy to get lost in the negative aspects of social media and discard the positive ones. Positive parts of social media such as widespread communication and unlimited access to information makes it all worth it. Staying on topic with positive aspects of social media and communication, social media in the workplace has also broken down barriers for communication. The article “A Guide to the Successful Use of Social Media in the Workplace” by Clark Boyd gives insight into how social media has improved the workplace, and ultimately communication and interaction as a whole. Companies can use social media as a form of branding and way to communicate their products (Boyd 4). Boyd states, “Harvard Business Review finds that 82% of employees believe social media improves work relationships. Left to their own devices, your teams will connect and communicate on social networks, both inside and outside the office.” This directly relates to the research question asking whether social media hinders our communication with each other. Social media also helps when it comes to dealing with complaints placed online. By seeing these through social media, it can help the company communicate either with the person or their company the concerns that are being stated (Boyd 9). Overall, it is safe to say that social media has directly affected communication throughout different aspects of our lives.

Research Question Two

My second set of research questions has a lot to do with the future and how we can improve. Questions such as: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? The article “What is Literacy” by James Paul Gee talks a lot about the basics of communication. I find this an important article to talk about before I go into more detail with this second research question. Gee explains discourse as a socially accepted way of speaking, thinking, and acting (Gee 1). It is important to note this because social media has changed that discourse for us. We no longer communicate and interact the same way in which we use to therefore almost giving us a new discourse. Another thing Gee discusses is identity kits. Gee explains identity kits as “appropriate costumes and instructions on how to act and talk” (Gee 2). This relates to social media because there is a certain way we communicate online that we wouldn’t do in person. For example, we use emojis and abbreviations to communicate on social media or over text, but this is something we would not do when communicating face-to-face. There are also some basic well-known rules of social media that follow along the lines of an identity kit. Such as, for Instagram it is a common idea not to like people’s pictures from too long ago. When you say this aloud it sounds like it is not a big deal and silly almost, but for people that use social media it is something that makes sense. The next article is going to focus more on the question that has to do with room for improvement of communication. The article “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media” by Francesca Valsesia, Davide Proserpio, and Joseph C. Nunes involves how we deal with social media and how we react to it. The article has a lot to do with pyramid schemes and marketing schemes on social media, simply due to follower count. Social media has a lot of power over us and the content we see. Influencers have too much impact on what we see every day and this overall effects our communication (Valsesia 1). Social media feeds us information at our fingertips, whether it be true or false. Valsesia is trying to get the point across that social media has no impact on our lives without the phone and therefore, having a smaller follower count is better for our communication and overall wellbeing in the first place. Leading into my next article, social media can have a huge impact on the younger generation. This leads into part of my second research question dealing with the younger generation and their communication. The article “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities” by Jacqueline Nesi shows how social media is a very complex brand of information and makes it complicated for everyone. Younger kids having access to it and multiple devices like computers and phones makes it that much more difficult. There are a lot of positives and negatives for younger kids having access to social media and the internet in general. It has an impact on their mental health and studies show it leads to signs of depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders (Nesi 2). It can also affect their communication and outward identity due to things such as bullying, internet drama, and behavioral problems. While it does have serious negative risks, social media also can bring a lot of new positive ones. Things like creative ideas, humor and entertainment, and being able to explore their identity are all really great positives that social media gives us (Nesi 4). Most of them using it as a way to connect with friends and family and help them feel a sense of acceptance and belonging (Nesi 4). Similarly to this, social media has given a great outlet for kids and young adults to speak out on issues going on in the world. The article “Building Bridges: Exploring the Communication Trends and Perceived Sociopolitical Benefits of Adolescents Engaging in Online Social Justice Efforts” by Mariah Elsa Kornbluh goes into detail about the racial injustices in the world and how they are communicated through social media. Social media networks can help connect kids to different backgrounds and aspects of their lives (Kornbluh 1). Kornbluh expresses how a society only can flourish under civic engagement and being able to express ourselves, and social media is helping us do that. It is helping the younger generation prepare for the civic role that they will undergo (Kornbluh 2). Social media helps play a major role in participating in political movements and bringing awareness to topics (Kornbluh 3). This all is done by the younger generation and would not be possible without them. So, while it is easy to look at the negative parts of social media and how it effects the younger generation, it also brings great awareness to real life problems in our world. This last article I wanted to go over dealing with this research question has to do with the pandemic. The article “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries” by Abu Elnasr E. Sobaih, Ahmed M. Hasanein and Ahmed E. Abu Elnasr briefly talks about communication with social media in higher education systems. Education systems had to switch from in person learning and communication to online learning, which was a struggle for everyone. Throughout the time that this took place, results showed that social media had a positive effect on students dealing with this (Sobaih 1). Students used social media to build a community and help support each other through this rough time. Through these results, proper usage of social media can be shown as a positive result for a new era of learning (Sobaih 1). This is just one more reason why social media can help us improve our future.

After answering my research questions, it has become clear to me that while social media does have negative aspects, the positive aspects outweigh them. Between the articles and my own research, I have enough evidence to prove that social media does effect communication, but in a more positive way. The way we act and present ourselves is heavily influenced by social media and communication between generations are different and can be seen that way. It is important to note the accomplishments we have made as a society with social media and the media in general. It has helped connect families, provide support groups, and provide entertainment in desperate times. Our communication has changed because of social media but has changed and helped us for the better in the long run. Keeping social media a positive place and staying away from the toxic people on it will only help us grow and learn new things about ourselves.

Works Cited

Boyd, Clark. “A Guide to Using Social Media in the Workplace in 2021.”  The Blueprint , The Blueprint, 13 May 2020, www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/.

https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/

D, Valdez, et al. “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data.”  Journal of Medical Internet Research  , vol. 22, no. 12, 14 Dec. 2020, pp. 1438–8871.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail? vid=8&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=33284783&db=mnh

J, Nesi. “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Health: Challenges and Opportunities.”  North Carolina Medical Journal , vol. 81, no. 2, 2020, pp. 116–121.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail?vid=10&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=32132255&db=mnh

Gee, James Paul. “What is literacy.”  Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning  across languages and cultures  (1998): 51-59.

https://academic.jamespaulgee.com/pdfs/Gee%20What%20is%20Literacy.pdf

Hanke, Stacey. “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate.”  Thrive Global , 13  Sept. 2018, thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/.

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=467b825c-34f8-4e47-95df-e5b2b61bbaf4%40sessionmgr4006

Kornbluh, Mariah Elsa. “Building Bridges.”  Youth & Society , vol. 51, no. 8, 2017, pp. 1104–1126., doi:10.1177/0044118×17723656.

https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/0044118X17723656

Retchin, Sarah, et al. “The Impact of Social Media Use on Social Skills.”  New York Behavioral Health , 1 Dec. 2020, newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/.

https://newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/

Sobaih, Abu Elnasr E., et al. “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries.”  MDPI , Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 12 Aug. 2020, www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm

Tayeb, Seyed Mohammad, et al. “The Role of Information Systems in Communication through Social Media.”  International Journal of Data and Network Science , vol. 3, no. 3, 2019, pp. 245–268., doi:10.5267/j.ijdns.2019.2.002.

http://www.growingscience.com/ijds/Vol3/ijdns_2019_15.pdf

Valsesia, Francesca, et al. “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media .”  Journal of Marketing Research  , vol. 57, no. 6, Dec. 2020, pp. 1152–1168.

https://www.francescavalsesia.com/uploads/1/0/5/1/105151509/the_positive_effect_of_not_following_others_on_social_media.pdf

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Lindsey Matier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Social Media Is Destroying Quality Human Interaction

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=388201

Social and digital media have become a huge part of today’s society. The Cyber World exists parallel to our physical reality in that the Internet, television, video games, and cell phones all play a role in shaping who we are as individuals existing together outside of technology. Experts say digital media helps us because it may enhance time management skills; increase productivity or social interactions; and may even improve optimism and self-esteem, as well as general knowledge. However, Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, claims that social media is a metaphor for real life. We think it might change our lives for the better, make it easier, make us happier… but we all know what they say: you can’t buy happiness. Well, social media comes with a cost. I want to argue that too much of it can become a problem where we are no longer helping ourselves, but where we are beginning to become handicapped by changing our relationships with society and perhaps even our evolutionary path.

Social media may appear to make our lives easier, but at the same time it complicates them. Studies show that the pressure of having to present oneself in a way that is acceptable to online friends increases stress levels. The fact that we have to worry about how we appear to “everyone” in cyber-society adds unnecessary stress to our lives. Simultaneously, we have far more information accessible to us than we’re programmed to have. Knowing too much about everything going on in the world through constant access to cyber reports requires us to be involved in it. We become seemingly too busy caring about the people we hardly know inside these machines; then we can no longer balance worrying about things with which we should be concerned, such as real-life relationships, skills, and (probably the most unfortunate) ourselves.

Constantly having access to anything we think we need or want at that moment, especially social interaction, becomes too much to handle and is technically not even real – it is cyber interaction. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs proves that you don’t need that constant connection with society to survive. We do not need to keep in contact with every single person we meet – only those with whom we’ve formed meaningful relationships, with whom we socialize outside of the cyber world. As Maslow theorizes, social interaction is in the middle of our necessities to survive. We need it in balance to reach self-actualization. However too much of it can drive a person insane; a plethora of information being thrown at us is bound to reveal unwanted material, such as accidently stumbling upon a spoiler for a movie you really wanted to see or worrying about that one (most likely harmless) person commenting your significant other’s photos. Digital media involves us in innumerous lives and events that are not always meant to be of our concern.

It is not just one form of digital media that affects our life relationships either. Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to find out about our friends “lives” without even having to talk to them – the media they choose to upload shows you. Television and movies show us models of perfect relationships so our real-life expectations of how others should act are altered. Films also show us hostile behaviors and sometimes make it seem okay to be a belligerent, violent individual. Similarly video games actually allow us to be the violent character, which in essence can teach us to behave more aggressively with others or be confused about how to act in general.

Social media appears to help us communicate and in turn make our lives easier, but it is in reality allowing us to access too much information and is handicapping us as a functioning society. My dad is always telling me that having a phone in my reach every minute of every day is a physical handicap because I have to either physically hold it or worry about misplacing or breaking it and losing my “entire life.” The fact that many other digital natives and I refer to our phones, a device that can play many different types of media, as “our entire life” is a bit ludicrous. I can do so much on my device that I feel it is comparable to my life, my reality… even though it is not. Digital natives are losing real life communication skills by forming online relationships with robots and learning these skills from them rather than living older generations. According to a study done by Majid Zorofi, professor of psychology at an Islamic university, many teenagers claim that it is much easier to talk via text message because it allows time to think before responding. I would say it is also much easier to be taught online where anything I need to know is a few Google-searches away. My generation is being taught via machines a multitude of topics… anything imaginable. I think it’s just too much information being shared through robots.

Jessica Serra

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The dying art of conversation – has technology killed our ability to talk  face-to -face?

Senior Lecturer, Media, Communication and Culture, Leeds Beckett University

Disclosure statement

Melanie Chan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Leeds Beckett University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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What with Facetime, Skype , Whatsapp and Snapchat, for many people, face-to-face conversation is used less and less often.

These apps allow us to converse with each other quickly and easily – overcoming distances, time zones and countries. We can even talk to virtual assistants such as Alexa, Cortana or Siri – commanding them to play our favourite songs, films, or tell us the weather forecast.

Often these ways of communicating reduce the need to speak to another human being. This has led to some of the conversational snippets of our daily lives now taking place mainly via technological devices . So no longer do we need to talk with shop assistants, receptionists, bus drivers or even coworkers, we simply engage with a screen to communicate whatever it is we want to say.

In fact, in these scenarios, we tend to only speak to other people when the digital technology does not operate successfully. For instance, human contact occurs when we call for an assistant to help us when an item is not recognised at the self-service checkout .

And when we have the ability to connect so quickly and easily with others using technological devices and software applications it is easy to start to overlook the value of face-to-face conversation. It seems easier to text someone rather than meet with them.

Bodily cues

My research into digital technologies indicates that phrases such as “word of mouth” or “keeping in touch” point to the importance of face-to-face conversation . Indeed, face-to-face conversation can strengthen social ties: with our neighbours, friends, work colleagues and other people we encounter during our day.

It acknowledges their existence, their humanness, in ways that instant messaging and texting do not. Face-to-face conversation is a rich experience that involves drawing on memories, making connections, making mental images, associations and choosing a response. Face-to-face conversation is also multisensory: it’s not just about sending or receiving pre-programmed trinkets such as likes, cartoon love hearts and grinning yellow emojis.

When having a conversation using video you mainly see another person’s face only as a flat image on a screen. But when we have a face-to-face conversation in real life, we can look into someone’s eyes, reach out and touch them. We can also observe the other person’s body posture and the gestures they use when speaking – and interpret these accordingly. All these factors, contribute to the sensory intensity and depth of the face-to-face conversations we have in daily life.

Speaking to machines

Sherry Turkle , professor of social studies of science and technology, warns that when we first “speak through machines, [we] forget how essential face-to-face conversation is to our relationships, our creativity, and our capacity for empathy”. But then “we take a further step and speak not just through machines but to machines”.

In many ways, our everyday lives now involve a blend of face-to-face and technologically mediated forms of communication. But in my teaching and research I explain how digital forms of communication can supplement, rather than replace face-to-face conversation.

At the same time though, it is also important to acknowledge that some people value online communication because they can express themselves in ways they might find difficult through face-to-face conversation.

Look up from your phone

Gary Turk , is a spoken word poet whose poem Look Up illustrates what is at stake by becoming entranced by technological ways of communicating at the expense of connecting with others face-to-face.

Turk’s poem draws attention to the rich, sensory aspects of face-to-face communication, valuing bodily presence in relation to friendship, companionship and intimacy. The central idea running through Turk’s evocative poem is that screen-based devices consume our attention while distancing us from the bodily sense of being with others.

Ultimately the sound, touch, smell and observation of bodily cues we experience when having a face-to-face conversation cannot be fully replaced by our technological devices. Communicating and connecting with others through face-to-face discussion is valuable because it is not something that can be edited, paused or replayed.

So next time you’re deciding between human or machine at the supermarket checkout or whether to get up from your desk and walk to another office to talk to a colleague – rather than sending them an email – it might be worth following Turk’s advice and engaging with the human rather than the screen.

• Social media
• Body language
• Text messages
• Face-to-face
• Conversations

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How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate

Stacey Hanke

What method of communication allows you to learn more about another person: a post on Facebook or a face-to-face conversation? We connect on a deeper, more meaningful level when we converse with others personally, yet studies show an increased dependency on social media. Why? 

Social media is a convenient way of communicating, but it lessens the quality of the connection.  Almost two-thirds of U.S. adults  admit they use social media to connect. Its rise to prominence changes our ability to interact with others on a meaningful level. Our social skills are challenged to the point that many now struggle to interact in traditional conversations. 

Before social media, the ways in which we connected and how many people we reached were limited. We depended on phone calls  and face-to-face interactions to strengthen relationships. On the upside, the latest technology provides endless ways to connect. We can also reach more people than ever. The downside is the way we communicate has also changed, challenging our ability to make meaningful connections. 

One survey revealed that 74 percent of Millennials prefer conversing digitally rather than in person. While this helps them communicate more efficiently, it diminishes their communication effectiveness. The more people use digital communication, the more interpersonal communication skills decline. Our need for rapid bits of information replaces our ability to clearly express thoughts and ideas when speaking to others.

Information Bingeing

Consider how often you check your phone and social media updates. Our “fear of missing out” has created bad habits that have rewired how we interact with each other. Some studies suggest the rise of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is directly associated with overuse of social media, as our brain easily loses focus due to ongoing demands for our attention. One study found that heavy users of digital media were twice as likely to develop ADHD than their peers, attributing such lack of focus to a continuous, daylong stream of information. This forces us to process more quickly and to crave more digital input. The more we get, the more we require to feel satisfied.

Social (un)Graces

Social media also challenges our communication etiquette. Our need for efficiency has surpassed the consequences of digital dialogue. People too often say whatever comes to mind without thinking about how the receiver will interpret their tone and intent. We miss the fact that there is a human on the other side of the screen. Ultimately, it has created more misunderstanding and miscommunication, which threatens our relationships.

From Twitter to text messaging, comments are limited to short one- or two-sentence answers. While it’s helped us make messages brief and clear, it’s done so at the expense of quality communication. Poor grammar is now commonplace, while abbreviations and acronyms have become commonplace.

Conversational Boredom

People have become addicted to their devices. A distressing 62 percent of people studied admit to using digital gadgets while with others. They most likely have no clue that  the quality of conversation and their ability to meaningfully engage is affected. 

One study evaluated how mobile devices affect the quality of face-to-face social interactions . Results found that conversations without digital devices were far superior to those conducted while devices were present. It also discovered that people in device-free conversations were better listeners and more empathetic to those speaking. Another study revealed that the presence of devices affected closeness, conversation quality and connection, especially when more meaningful topics were being discussed. 

Take Control

Social media and digital dialogue can have its place in our world if we take control of our usage, both personally and professionally. Start implementing these five steps to gain more awareness of your digital addiction:

•   Use your calendar to schedule short periods each day to check social media updates. Refrain from checking in outside of your scheduled times. This will ensure you  remain accountable for  time spent online and encourage traditional communication method

2. Leave your phone behind. During a meeting or presentation, leave your phone at your desk. Do this as well when you visit a co-worker’s desk or head to the breakroom. This will make it easy to engage without disruption. When it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.

3. Choose one day a week to be technology free. Consider turning off all technology ­– computers, phones and tablets – one day a week. Make this a rule for the whole family. Challenge yourselves to engage with each other in more personal ways.

4. Go cold turkey. If you believe your social media use borders on addiction, or if you don’t feel strong enough to resist the urge, use an app to silence social media. Tools such as Facebook Eradicator will silence your news feed entirely and help you slowly reprogram your need to read.

5. Pick up the phone for its intended use. Call a friend instead of messaging. Video call a client instead of emailing. Walk over to a co-worker instead of instant messaging. Either way, choose to use your technology for a more intentional connection.

There is no denying that social media has been helpful in connecting us with others. We also can’t deny its unfortunate impact on our social skills, making us lazy communicators and disrupting our need for meaningful conversation.

But by implementing these five steps today, you can begin redirecting your attention to genuine conversational connections. We can change that now by taking ownership of technology use and becoming more intentional in personal, face-to-face conversations.

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

Carol Yepes/Getty Images

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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Are Young People's Social Skills Declining?

New research eases fear of technology’s negative impact on youth..

Posted April 15, 2020 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

For more than a decade, adults have argued that technology is having a detrimental effect on young people's social skills. New research may clear up this debate.

Theories about how children and teens have lost their ability to communicate effectively due to technology have become popularized and circulated widely on social media by authors with little evidence to back up their assertions. Research has reinforced this speculation too, including a UCLA study that conducted an experiment with 51 sixth-graders for five days, hardly a large enough sample for reliable conclusions.

One fact that most people agree upon is the importance of social skills to young people's life success. If social skills are truly declining, then researchers should be sounding the alarm. But are they? In the latest edition of the American Journal of Sociology , researchers compared parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of children’s social skills from data collected in three longitudinal studies (Downey & Gibbs, 2020).

This new study, led by Douglas Downey of Ohio State University, is the first to take a deeper dive into a large, representative sample of American youth during years when children’s use of the internet at home increased substantially. Aimed at answering the question, “Are children’s social skills declining?” researchers used statistics collected by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of 1998 and 2010 and the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. In all, more than 60,000 K-8 children were represented.

In each study, teachers and parents were asked questions related to children’s social skills, including their ability to form and maintain friendships, express feelings in positive ways, and get along with people different from themselves. The same questions were asked of teachers and parents over the 12-year span.

From 1998 to 2010, teacher perceptions of children’s social skills remained relatively unchanged, as did their evaluation of kid’s self-control . The same pattern of perceptions continued as children progressed through first, third, and fifth grades. In fact, teachers rated children’s social skills slightly higher in 2010 than in 1998.

A similar narrative was reported by parents. Parents rated their children’s social skills much as teachers had, with slightly higher evaluations at the end of the 12-year period than at the beginning.

The bottom line is that no decline in social skills was noted by teachers or parents during this period of increased internet activity.

Social Skills Are One Aspect of Thriving

While this new study presents a reassuring picture that social skills have not suffered as the result of technology use, it is important to note that sociability is only one aspect of thriving. Abilities like resilience , self-awareness, and resourcefulness, among others, play an integral role in child and adolescent development.

A growing number of scholars are studying these and other developmental attributes of thriving, including the potentially positive effects of internet usage on children. For example, researchers have observed how email and social media help students build and maintain social networks. New media can enhance existing friendships, negotiate parent-child relationships, and link kids to online interest-driven groups that boost their creativity .

Recent research about graphic animations (GIF’s) suggest these images can convey nuanced and complex layers of meaning that are not possible with text-only or face-to-face communication. Hence, studies are beginning to show that people may overestimate the negative consequences of technology, not only on social skills but in other areas as well. In fact, studies suggest that new technologies may be enabling more effective face-to-face connections.

Why Social Skills Are Not Declining

Downey and his associate reflected on the results of their study, asking, “Why did children’s face-to-face social skills not decline in the way most would have expected?”

They believe that “moral panic ” over the predicted consequences of new technology led adults to believe that children’s social skills were in a free fall. This belief implied the assumption that sociability evolves in a linear manner. For example, if one believes that more time on the internet leads to fewer face-to-face interactions, one might also believe a decline in social skills will follow.

Kids develop social skills in much more complex and nonlinear ways. The internet may reduce social skills in some ways and promote them in others. It is not a zero-sum experience.

A 1998 study initially showed a negative relationship between kids’ screen time and social skills, including an increase in depression and loneliness . A follow-up study by the same researchers in 2002 no longer found those negative associations. Why?

The change in data may suggest that as children have become more adept at using technology, the negative consequences have diminished. Rather than undermining social relationships, the authors suggest that “screen-based technologies may be better understood as providing a new platform by which children seek autonomy from parents, develop group norms and sanction peers, build and maintain identities, and in some ways, develop social skills.”

Based on this study, should children’s screen time be limited? If parents are concerned with a decline in children’s social skills, this study shows no evidence that limiting screen time would have meaningful benefit.

That said, there may be other good reasons to limit screen time. There are many differing opinions and research, including surprising insights from teens on the disadvantages of social networking and internet usage.

Downey, D. B., & Gibbs, B. G. (2020). Kids these days: Are face-to-face social skills among American children declining? American Journal of Sociology , 125(4), 1030-1083.

Kraut, R., Kiesler, S, Boneva, B., Cummings, J., Helgeson, V., and Crawford, A. (2002). Internet paradox revisited . Journal of Social Issues 58 (1): 49–74.

Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukophadhyay, T., and Scherlis, W. (1998). Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? American Psychologis t 53 (9):

Miltner, K. M., and Highfield, T. (2017). Never gonna GIF you up: Analyzing the cultural significance of the animated GIF, Social Media1 Society 3 (3).

Uhls, Y. T., Michikyan, M., Morris, J., Garcia, D., Small, G. W., Zgourou, E., & Greenfield, P. M. (2014). Five days at outdoor education camp without screens improves preteen skills with nonverbal emotion cues. Computers in Human Behavior , 39, 387-392.

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, Ph.D., is an Institute for Social Innovation Fellow at Fielding Graduate University and author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers.

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64% of Americans say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today

About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 13-19, 2020. Just one-in-ten Americans say social media sites have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going, and one-quarter say these platforms have a neither positive nor negative effect.

Those who have a negative view of the impact of social media mention, in particular, misinformation and the hate and harassment they see on social media. They also have concerns about users believing everything they see or read – or not being sure about what to believe. Additionally, they bemoan social media’s role in fomenting partisanship and polarization, the creation of echo chambers, and the perception that these platforms oppose President Donald Trump and conservatives.

This is part of a series of posts on Americans’ experiences with and attitudes about the role of social media in politics today. Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans think about the impact of social media on the way things are currently going in the country. To explore this, we surveyed 10,211 U.S. adults from July 13 to 19, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

The public’s views on the positive and negative effect of social media vary widely by political affiliation and ideology. Across parties, larger shares describe social media’s impact as mostly negative rather than mostly positive, but this belief is particularly widespread among Republicans.

Roughly half of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (53%) say social media have a largely negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, compared with 78% of Republicans and leaners who say the same. Democrats are about three times as likely as Republicans to say these sites have a mostly positive impact (14% vs. 5%) and twice as likely to say social media have neither a positive nor negative effect (32% vs. 16%).

Among Democrats, there are no differences in these views along ideological lines. Republicans, however, are slightly more divided by ideology. Conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate to liberal Republicans to say social media have a mostly negative effect (83% vs. 70%). Conversely, moderate to liberal Republicans are more likely than their conservative counterparts to say social media have a mostly positive (8% vs. 4%) or neutral impact (21% vs. 13%).

Younger adults are more likely to say social media have a positive impact on the way things are going in the country and are less likely to believe social media sites have a negative impact compared with older Americans. For instance, 15% of those ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today, while just 8% of those over age 30 say the same. Americans 18 to 29 are also less likely than those 30 and older to say social media have a mostly negative impact (54% vs. 67%).

However, views among younger adults vary widely by partisanship. For example, 43% of Democrats ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going, compared with about three-quarters (76%) of Republicans in the same age group. In addition, these youngest Democrats are more likely than their Republican counterparts to say social media platforms have a mostly positive (20% vs. 6%) or neither a positive nor negative effect (35% vs. 18%) on the way things are going in the country today. This partisan division persists among those 30 and older, but most of the gaps are smaller than those seen within the younger cohort.

Views on the negative impact of social media vary only slightly between social media users (63%) and non-users (69%), with non-users being slightly more likely to say these sites have a negative impact. However, among social media users, those who say some or a lot of what they see on social media is related to politics are more likely than those who say a little or none of what they see on these sites is related to politics to think social media platforms have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today (65% vs. 50%).

Past Pew Research Center studies have drawn attention to the complicated relationships Americans have with social media. In 2019, a Center survey found that 72% of U.S. adults reported using at least one social media site. And while these platforms have been used for political and social activism and engagement , they also raise concerns among portions of the population. Some think political ads on these sites are unacceptable, and many object to the way social media platforms have been weaponized to spread made-up news and engender online harassment . At the same time, a share of users credit something they saw on social media with changing their views about a political or social issue. And growing shares of Americans who use these sites also report feeling worn out by political posts and discussions on social media.

Those who say social media have negative impact cite concerns about misinformation, hate, censorship; those who see positive impact cite being informed

When asked to elaborate on the main reason why they think social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country today, roughly three-in-ten (28%) respondents who hold that view mention the spreading of misinformation and made-up news. Smaller shares reference examples of hate, harassment, conflict and extremism (16%) as a main reason, and 11% mention a perceived lack of critical thinking skills among many users – voicing concern about people who use these sites believing everything they see or read or being unsure about what to believe.

In written responses that mention misinformation or made-up news, a portion of adults often include references to the spread, speed and amount of false information available on these platforms. (Responses are lightly edited for spelling, style and readability.) For example:

“They allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.” –Man, 36

“False information is spread at lightning speed – and false information never seems to go away.” –Woman, 71

“Social media is rampant with misinformation both about the coronavirus and political and social issues, and the social media organizations do not do enough to combat this.” –Woman, 26

“Too much misinformation and lies are promoted from unsubstantiated sources that lead people to disregard vetted and expert information.” –Woman, 64

People’s responses that centered around hate, harassment, conflict or extremism in some way often mention concerns that social media contributes to incivility online tied to anonymity, the spreading of hate-filled ideas or conspiracies, or the incitement of violence.

“People say incendiary, stupid and thoughtless things online with the perception of anonymity that they would never say to someone else in person.” –Man, 53

“Promotes hate and extreme views and in some cases violence.” –Man, 69

“People don’t respect others’ opinions. They take it personally and try to fight with the other group. You can’t share your own thoughts on controversial topics without fearing someone will try to hurt you or your family.” –Woman, 65

“Social media is where people go to say some of the most hateful things they can imagine.” –Man, 46

About one-in-ten responses talk about how people on social media can be easily confused and believe everything they see or read or are not sure about what to believe.

“People believe everything they see and don’t verify its accuracy.” –Man, 75

“Many people can’t distinguish between real and fake news and information and share it without doing proper research …” –Man, 32

“You don’t know what’s fake or real.” –Man, 49

“It is hard to discern truth.” –Woman, 80

“People cannot distinguish fact from opinion, nor can they critically evaluate sources. They tend to believe everything they read, and when they see contradictory information (particularly propaganda), they shut down and don’t appear to trust any information.” –Man, 42

Smaller shares complain that the platforms censor content or allow material that is biased (9%), too negative (7%) or too steeped in partisanship and division (6%).

“Social media is censoring views that are different than theirs. There is no longer freedom of speech.” –Woman, 42

“It creates more divide between people with different viewpoints.” –Man, 37

“Focus is on negativity and encouraging angry behavior rather than doing something to help people and make the world better.” –Woman, 66

Far fewer Americans – 10% – say they believe social media has a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today. When those who hold these positive views were asked about the main reason why they thought this, one-quarter say these sites help people stay informed and aware (25%) and about one-in-ten say they allow for communication, connection and community-building (12%).

“We are now aware of what’s happening around the world due to the social media outlet.” –Woman, 28

“It brings awareness to important issues that affect all Americans.” –Man, 60

“It brings people together; folks can see that there are others who share the same/similar experience, which is really important, especially when so many of us are isolated.” –Woman, 36

“Helps people stay connected and share experiences. I also get advice and recommendations via social media.” –Man, 32

“It keeps people connected who might feel lonely and alone if there did not have social media …” – Man, 65

Smaller shares tout social media as a place where marginalized people and groups have a voice (8%) and as a venue for activism and social movements (7%).

“Spreading activism and info and inspiring participation in Black Lives Matter.” –Woman, 31

“It gives average people an opportunity to voice and share their opinions.” –Man, 67

“Visibility – it has democratized access and provided platforms for voices who have been and continue to be oppressed.” –Woman, 27

Note: This is part of a series of blog posts leading up to the 2020 presidential election that explores the role of social media in politics today. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Other posts in this series:

• 23% of users in U.S. say social media led them to change views on an issue; some cite Black Lives Matter
• 54% of Americans say social media companies shouldn’t allow any political ads
• 55% of U.S. social media users say they are ‘worn out’ by political posts and discussions
• Americans think social media can help build movements, but can also be a distraction
• Misinformation
• Misinformation Online
• National Conditions
• Political Discourse
• Politics Online
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Brooke Auxier is a former research associate focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center .

Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy

­most americans favor restrictions on false information, violent content online, as ai spreads, experts predict the best and worst changes in digital life by 2035, social media seen as mostly good for democracy across many nations, but u.s. is a major outlier, the role of alternative social media in the news and information environment, most popular.

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How Social Media Impacts Communication Skills

By Soha Mahapatra

How many times do you use any form of social media in a day? Chances are, it’s a lot. In the United States, users open social media an average of seventeen times each day. While it might be tempting to check in with family and friends, keep informed with the news, or look up what your favorite influencer has been doing recently, all this social media use is taking a toll on your communication skills. 

Having good communication skills means being able to communicate and receive information clearly and effectively. This is a skillset that can be applicable in almost any social situation or career, and is incredibly important within daily interactions. Being able to hold a meaningful conversation with a peer, or taking a few significant points from a meeting with your teacher seem like basic interactions, but they are more difficult than you think. This is because of the negative impact social media has on your communication skills, specifically in the areas of literacy, confidence, social awkwardness, facilitating quality experiences. 

Social media has proven to decrease the literacy and writing quality of many individuals.

Constantly using improper grammar and spelling when texting friends may seem convenient, but it is hurting your writing and written communication skills in the long run. How many times have you accidentally used a “texting term” when typing an essay or taking notes? 

The confidence of an individual can also be depleted by social media use. Having a feed of people posting their lives completely filtered only shows the good stuff.

However, it could potentially lead to self esteem issues through comparing yourself to others online. This lack of confidence translates to in person interactions, as bad feelings about yourself making it difficult to interact with others face to face. 

Social awkwardness goes hand in hand with confidence. Hiding behind screens when communicating with others gives you power to say whatever you please, because you’re not actually seeing someone’s face. But not seeing someone’s face and having practice with in person conversations leaves you void of understanding social cues and other human emotions. Studies have shown that excessive time spent on social media also leads to in person social anxiety. 

Having an addiction to technology leads to lack of quality experiences that don’t involve a screen. When hanging out with friends, how long does it take for one of you to take your phones out?

Being constantly on social media leads to a lack of meaningful, face to face conversations.

Some adults have even stated that they would rather stay home and post on a social media platform instead of going out with friends or experiencing something. What is the point of life if you’re staring at a tiny screen all day, looking at pictures of what other people are doing instead of going out and doing things for yourself? 

Overall, social media does have its benefits of keeping us connected and allowing us to interact with others that have similar interests. But, like with anything, it needs to be used in moderation in order to maintain communication skills and keep a grip on the real world. 

https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/how-social-media-affected-communication/

https://mentalitch.com/how-does-social-media-worsen-our-communication-skills/

https://theknowledgereview.com/effects-social-media-communication-skills/

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/03/the-negatives-of-digital-life/

Social Media and Interpersonal Relationships

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Social media has become popular with the Internet’s increased influence on communication. Naturally, this change has both negative and positive impacts on society and the way we interact with each other. So, what effect does social media have on interpersonal relationships? This essay will try to answer this question.

Today, the number of social networks is growing drastically. The developers of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, among others, have been competing to offer excellent features.

This can be categorised in terms of privacy, interaction, socialization as well as entertainment. Through the use of wide range of communication platform, the sites can be accessed from laptops, mobile phones, iPhones, and iPads. This has made it easy for people to interact freely anytime given that they have internet connections.

The social media has made it easy for people to communicate without need for face to face interactions. However, the concern has been whether social media is eradicating the essence of interpersonal relationship. Interpersonal relationships involve the association between people for a long period, where the association is based emotional feelings, social commitments as well as regular interactions.

The relationships can occur in different situations, such as friends, clubs, acquaintances, family, workplaces, and churches among others. The difference between the two is that interpersonal relations are determined and regulated by society, law and customs that are shared. Social media has both the negative and positive impacts to individuals’ relationships that affect daily activities.

The social media has both negative and positive impacts on relationships. However, the social media is expected to have more positive than negative impacts because of lowered constraints of traditional communication (Anderson, 1). This has made it possible for people to connect more rapidly with more zeal and zest. According to Jain (1) the social media enables people connect easily with many other people from different parts of life far more than the people we meet in the street.

This is true because people share what they have in common and they make a relation out of it. However, this is degrading the traditional ways in which relationships were initiated and accomplished. But the social media has that ability of bringing people from different social and cultural backgrounds more easily than the traditional mode of communication. Therefore, social media can help one meet many friends than they could ever meet in their life thus enriching their relationships.

Introverts have the chance of strengthening their relations through the social media. Relations in the workplace can be strengthened through the social media and it has been made easy for employees to exchange ideas (Conlin and MacMillan 1). Through the social media brands can be enriched through the wider range of friends and followers. However, it also ruins the relationships in the workplace and reduces productivity. This is because a lot of time is spent and hate and hatred can be spread over through social networks.

In a negative way, social media is ruining some of the relationships based on the comments made by other people. For instance, intimate relationships can ruined because of some post like in face book or twitter. Meraji (1) note that some posts made on face book or tweets made can lead to resentment that generates hate and hatred.

This can ruin closer relationship because of some comments made on your wall. Some forgotten relationships can no longer be forgotten and escaped if one is using the social media. This is because it has become a platform where everybody meets and friends of friends are on it. Social media can be detrimental to relationships because of the negativity it may arouse. For example, negative or moody response can affect the real time relationships.

Social media and the internet are robbing off people the time that can be used in a more constructive and intimate face to face communication (Anderson 2). This is because most of the friends in the social media use fake names, give wrong information about themselves, and even create the aspect of intolerance and impatient. This harms the real relations more and it is happening in the real world.

The communication that creates the feeling of remorse when wrong is done, is not present in the social media relationships. Social media interactions can now strengthen far away relationships. This is because the people can easily communicate and according to Anderson (2) geographical distance is no longer a hindrance to relationship. This has made some of the relations blossom

It can be concluded that social media has both positive and negative effects on relationships. The mode in which they are necessitated consumes a lot of people time that could have been applied in a more face to face communication. This has endangered the traditional mode of communication and can be detrimental to relationships.

However, it has made it possible to enhance the communication and keep long distanced relationships in check. It has also made it easy for people to interact more easily and one can make friends online rapidly than it can occur in real life. Contrary, the social media can break relationships and create aspects like intolerance and impatient. It is believed that social media would be having more positive impacts on relationships as time goes on.

Works Cited

Anderson, Jenna. Q. “The Future of Social Relations”. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project . 2010. Web.

Conlin, Michelle and Douglas, MacMillan. Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations . 2009. Web.

Jain, Rachana . 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Your Relationships . 2010. Web.

Meraji, Shereen. In The Age Of Social Media, Can You Escape Your Ex? . 2010. Web.

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Social Media Is Ruining Our Social Skills

Albert Einstein once said that “it has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Unfortunately, evidence from the research that people have done proves that he is right. In current studies, scientists are conducting experiments to determine whether or not social media is ruining our social skills. Many people are not aware that most of these studies are showing results that, yes, social media is a large interference when it comes to communication skills. People are texting rather than talking face to face, and due to this, they are losing the ability to clearly understand what the other person is implying (“Negative Effects...). After this skill of understanding others through gestures is reduced, the risk of hurting relationships because of a misunderstanding is increased. This is becoming a larger problem because while communicating by technological means, people are not developing the social skills and sympathy that are required to communicate with other human beings. In a world where communication is primarily dominated by technology, people, specifically teens, should educate themselves on how social media can ruin and create problems in their communication and social skills. There was a time, before technology and social media, when face to face conversation or writing a letter was the only way to get things done. To get together, people would have to plan meetings in advance, and carry through with those plans. To communicate with people who lived a distance away, a letter would have to be written to get the information that far. There was not a way to just send a quick text message , or give a call to cancel plans last minute. People’s relationships were built with strong bonds because of the fact that talking, face to face, was the only way to work problems out. One day, the telephone was invented, and that was when communication became that much more complicated. Being in touch with friends used to be much simpler because people did not feel like they had to sit for hours at a time, trying to pick apart one text message to acquire the meaning behind it. It is 2017, and the vast majority of people would rather send a text message or a direct message to avoid direct

Pros And Cons Of Social Media Essay

These drawbacks include too many people being reliant to talking online rather than in person and not verbally communicating with friends even though they are in the same room. Jasmine Fowlkes shows the reality in how social media is affecting our new generation through her article, “Viewpoint: Why Social Media is Destroying our Social Skills.” After discussing the results conducted by several researchers, Fowlkes states,“As more generations are born into the social age, social media will continue to be the favored communication form among young people. However, this shift may begin to affect their ability to properly communicate in person with peers.” Many start to rely on applications on our devices to talk to people, but this results in less verbal communication. In addition, Kelly-Fay’s Talktrack research study showed that conversations held in person are much more impactful than on social media. Rather than making social media a huge part of your life, Fowlkes wishes that people would look up from their phones and engage more with others since that could change their lives.

Social Media 's Impact On Communication

Communication has been permanently changed by social media. A wide conceptual definition of social media, as cited in Ressler & Glazer (2010), is “The online and mobile accessible services that enable individuals to connect, collaborate, and share with others in real time.” Social media has an obvious influence on informal communication style and represents both possibility and liability for healthcare institutions. As cited in Bernhardt, Alber, & Gold (2014), “Social media provide healthcare professionals with tools to share information, to debate health care policy and practice issues, to promote health behaviors, to engage with the public, and to educate and interact with patients, caregivers, students, and colleagues.” It also presents challenges, including risks to information accuracy, organizational reputation, and individual privacy. Social media can be a very helpful in communicating among nurses and other healthcare providers while creating professional connections, and sharing experiences, but guidelines for appropriate use by healthcare providers are essential. Whether or not certain healthcare organization decides to use social media as a communications tool - social media policy still need to be implemented. Policies help establish an organization 's rules and expectations around social media.

Social Media And Its Impacts On Communication

The introduction and the spread of the Internet have revolutionized the way individuals communicate and interact with each other. According to Van and Thomas, propagation of this medium of interaction or communication makes it unimaginable to remember that only a few decades back when people had to wait for days, weeks or even months to receive letters from their friends, relatives, or various agencies (3). Today, the internet has made communication quick and cost-effective for most of the people. The latest innovation or by-product from the web is social media. There are various social media platforms, which individuals find new friends, keep

Social Networking and Its Affects on Interpersonal Communication

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past five years, welcome to the world of social networking. According to ComScore, over one billion people use social networking sites across the globe. That means that everyone who’s anyone has a page or account with twitter, myspace, facebook, skype or any of the other hundred emerging sites. People have discovered a better way to communicate with other people all over the world, far surpassing snail mail and e-mail. Why send a letter to your cousin living in France or pay outrageous money for a phone call to your brother stationed in the Middle

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

However, like genetics, it also has many negatives. Technology does improve the world’s ability to communicate quickly and easily, but it also separates people socially. Social media and smartphones for example, have dramatically reduced human interaction. Everyone would rather communicate online than in the real world. According to Pew Research Center, “Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis” (Smith and Anderson 1). This a huge portion the the American population that is using Facebook alone. There are many other social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest that attract even more users. The more people use these services, the less they interact with others in person. Aldous Huxley once said, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards” (Huxley 1). Before the technology that exists today, people were unable to communicate with others that weren’t in their area. Now, people tend to communicate with those around them less. As technology continues to improve, this situation will only become worse. Preventative action must be taken to prevent this from destroying human

ISU Part 1: Research

There are many risks that come with excessive social media use. One of which is its effects on important social skills children need in their futures. Texting, Social Media messaging, and even phone calls erode on a child's communication and can harm their relationships with their peers. One way they do this is by reducing the intimacy when communicating. Without a person's face and voice, conversations with them over various Social Media makes the conversation less important and may drive the two people apart. The quality of conversations also plummets as long, descriptive sentences are a taboo when instant messaging. The use of shorter, compact words and text slang may limit the child in how they are able to express themselves later in their life. Finally, Social Media prevents children from practicing empathy. Missing facial expressions, voices, and body language limit the use of this important skill and may keep a child from noticing when a peer or loved one is distressed. A study done by UCLA Scientists took two groups of sixth graders,

Face Time Vs. Screen Time By Chandra Johnson

As this article state about the cons of using modern ways of communication and lacking of feelings, I feel that at some extend, I agree with author’s opinion. As Jim Taylor points out, “Kids want to be hugged and touched; they don’t want to be texted. There’s basic need to fill that social bond” (Johnson, Chandra), this explains the truth. We can not always express the feelings of sympathetic and empathetic through texting or phone call. This modern technology did change our lifestyle. In addition, people do use texting or other messaging applications to avoid complications talks instead of talking to another person face to face and also create a language barrier between them.

Essay on The Negative Affects of Cell Phone Use

• 11 Works Cited

Consequently, people who text a lot may be more uncomfortable with in-person communication.” Taking this information into account, it becomes clear that cell phones have essentially decreased face-to-face socialization and have socially affected those who use cell phones as a main source of communication. Along with the absence of face-to-face social interaction, arises the issue of resolving problems via text rather than in person. Cell phones have provided a way to hide behind technology from emotionally distressing events, such as ending relationships (Campbell, 2005).

Response Article Response Paper

The receiver would get it three days later and their response time would be the same. In comparison, technology has come an extremely long ways, and it has many benefits for nurses, doctors, and even teachers. For example, the option to take an online class is convenient for the general public who work full time, and have a full time family to care for is an enormous detriment. Furthermore, technology has scores of benefits, which astray society’s cognizant of its negative effects on humanity. In addition to communication being affected, think about the rise in bullying, exclusively “cyber bullying;” the unlimited access to substantially any information you can think of; and of course the absence of face-to-face communication. Many young girls are beating themselves up about being too fat or too skinny, not having the right color of hair, or the right clothes. To be friends with someone and to honestly get a grasp on their true character cannot be done without face-to-face verbal

Social Media and Its Impact on Social Behavior

Social media has drastically changed how people communicate. How many people remember how it feels to hear the phone ring in the house or receive a letter in the mail? Today’s youth know nothing other than text messages, tweets, and Facebook. Social media and the social entertaining websites of today have affected social behavior in many ways. While there are many advantages to this technological advancement, these advancements can also result in many changes in social behaviors. Some of the few prominent changes in social behavior, due to social media, are lack of communication skills, changes in self-esteem and cyber

Texting Changed Communication

In the article, Elaine, a seventeen year old girl, explains how various forms of electronic messaging allow individuals to edit their thoughts. She goes on to say that “The best communication programs shield the writer from the view of the reader. The advantage of screen communication is that it is a place to reflect, retype, and edit” (Turkle, 374). People also feel less pressure to come up with a response when it comes to text messaging because you can edit your responses in a way that best suits you at any given time (Turkle, 374). This form of communication is different from talking to somebody on the phone because there is a consistent pressure to keep the flow of conversation during a phone call. Talking to someone on the phone means that your responses have to be quicker and less thought out, which makes it easier to say something you possibly do not mean. This relates to my friend Coty, because he has always been shy. In school he was the quietest person in the class. So when one of our friends Brooke started texting him over the summer, it was a pretty big stepping stone for him. After getting to know her over the summer, he began to really like her on a personal level. When it comes to texting, others tend to put people on a pedestal and fantasize that they are the person they want them to be (Turkle, 374). This can also be misleading

The Effects Of Social Media On Our Society

When you are suffering from a debilitating addiction, it 's easy to feel alone, isolated, and frightened during recovery. However, the emergence of social media has helped connect the world in a way never imagined. And you can tap into these brand new resource as a tool towards fueling our recovery and regaining a life of sobriety.

Informative Speech : Speech Outline

Face-to-face communication seems to be a dying art – replaced by text messaging, e-mails, and social media. Human communication and interactions are shaped by available technologies.

Explain How Social Media Changed Communication

Social Media is an important communication tool via a series of Websites and Applications used by millions of people which facilitates the creation and the sharing of content and information, which allows people to develop contacts and relationships to connect with each other efficiently through modern technology such as computers and mobile phones to fulfil people’s social needs. The “Social,” in Social Media refers to interacting with other people through sharing and receiving information and the “Media,” refers to the instrument of communication e.g. phone. Social Media is important since it has connected millions of people and Social Media is one of the dominant ways we communicate with each other. As of 2017 over 2.8 billion people use Social Media worldwide. It is hard to remember communication prior to the emergence of social media.

Social Media And Its Effects On Society

Romantic relationships have become super complicated in recent years. The movie He’s Just Not That into You portrays ten people’s perspectives on relationships and dating in the 21st century. This movie was written as interweaving stories that come together in different ways that make a point. People find the world of dating to be complicated and most times confusing. There is always a fear of cheating and falling in love with manipulative people. Social media has also become a huge part of modern dating. Everything from texting to dating websites can influence how people view potential mates. The Facebook status was invented expressly for discovering if someone was single within the first couple seconds of being on the page. You can practically advertise that you’re single to any of you friends in hopes of finding a date. Dating today can be fraught with conflict and miscommunication and is vastly different from the dating world fifty years ago as it now includes a “hookup” culture, a non marriage centered mentality, and the use of modern technology.

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How Does Social Media Affect Your Mental Health?

Facebook has delayed the development of an Instagram app for children amid questions about its harmful effects on young people’s mental health. Does social media have an impact on your well-being?

By Nicole Daniels

What is your relationship with social media like? Which platforms do you spend the most time on? Which do you stay away from? How often do you log on?

What do you notice about your mental health and well-being when spending time on social networks?

In “ Facebook Delays Instagram App for Users 13 and Younger ,” Adam Satariano and Ryan Mac write about the findings of an internal study conducted by Facebook and what they mean for the Instagram Kids app that the company was developing:

Facebook said on Monday that it had paused development of an Instagram Kids service that would be tailored for children 13 years old or younger, as the social network increasingly faces questions about the app’s effect on young people’s mental health. The pullback preceded a congressional hearing this week about internal research conducted by Facebook , and reported in The Wall Street Journal , that showed the company knew of the harmful mental health effects that Instagram was having on teenage girls. The revelations have set off a public relations crisis for the Silicon Valley company and led to a fresh round of calls for new regulation. Facebook said it still wanted to build an Instagram product intended for children that would have a more “age appropriate experience,” but was postponing the plans in the face of criticism.

The article continues:

With Instagram Kids, Facebook had argued that young people were using the photo-sharing app anyway, despite age-requirement rules, so it would be better to develop a version more suitable for them. Facebook said the “kids” app was intended for ages 10 to 12 and would require parental permission to join, forgo ads and carry more age-appropriate content and features. Parents would be able to control what accounts their child followed. YouTube, which Google owns, has released a children’s version of its app. But since BuzzFeed broke the news this year that Facebook was working on the app, the company has faced scrutiny. Policymakers, regulators, child safety groups and consumer rights groups have argued that it hooks children on the app at a younger age rather than protecting them from problems with the service, including child predatory grooming, bullying and body shaming.

The article goes on to quote Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram:

Mr. Mosseri said on Monday that the “the project leaked way before we knew what it would be” and that the company had “few answers” for the public at the time. Opposition to Facebook’s plans gained momentum this month when The Journal published articles based on leaked internal documents that showed Facebook knew about many of the harms it was causing. Facebook’s internal research showed that Instagram, in particular, had caused teen girls to feel worse about their bodies and led to increased rates of anxiety and depression, even while company executives publicly tried to minimize the app’s downsides.

But concerns about the effect of social media on young people go beyond Instagram Kids, the article notes:

A children’s version of Instagram would not fix more systemic problems, said Al Mik, a spokesman for 5Rights Foundation, a London group focused on digital rights issues for children. The group published a report in July showing that children as young as 13 were targeted within 24 hours of creating an account with harmful content, including material related to eating disorders, extreme diets, sexualized imagery, body shaming, self-harm and suicide. “Big Tobacco understood that the younger you got to someone, the easier you could get them addicted to become a lifelong user,” Doug Peterson, Nebraska’s attorney general, said in an interview. “I see some comparisons to social media platforms.” In May, attorneys general from 44 states and jurisdictions had signed a letter to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to end plans for building an Instagram app for children. American policymakers should pass tougher laws to restrict how tech platforms target children, said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a Boston-based group that was part of an international coalition of children’s and consumer groups opposed to the new app. Last year, Britain adopted an Age Appropriate Design Code , which requires added privacy protections for digital services used by people under the age of 18.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

Do you think Facebook made the right decision in halting the development of the Instagram Kids app? Do you think there should be social media apps for children 13 and younger? Why or why not?

What is your reaction to the research that found that Instagram can have harmful mental health effects on teenagers, particularly teenage girls? Have you experienced body image issues, anxiety or depression tied to your use of the app? How do you think social media affects your mental health?

What has your experience been on different social media apps? Are there apps that have a more positive or negative effect on your well-being? What do you think could explain these differences?

Have you ever been targeted with inappropriate or harmful content on Instagram or other social media apps? What responsibility do you think social media companies have to address these issues? Do you think there should be more protections in place for users under 18? Why or why not?

What does healthy social media engagement look like for you? What habits do you have around social media that you feel proud of? What behaviors would you like to change? How involved are your parents in your social media use? How involved do you think they should be?

If you were in charge of making Instagram, or another social media app, safer for teenagers, what changes would you make?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

Question of the Week: Is social media destroying communication skills?

By Karina Putman

Your personal answer completely depends on how you view the phrase “communication skills.” To me, the phrase fully connects itself to the simple ability to relay what you want to say in an effective manner, so that another person understands what you’re trying to get across.

Perhaps, the communication skills that I have were not easily spotted in that sentence, but I hope that made a bit of sense. So, depending on your view of the phrase “communication skills”, this answer may differ. I do not believe that social media has destroyed communication skills in any manner.

This is due to the fact that, even if one has lost a bit of their written grammar, a person is still able to understand what you write and what you are trying to say.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Many people may agree with this, but point out the fact that texting is taking the place of phone calls (which, in turn, is destroying communication skills), but again, it all depends on your opinion of social skills and also social media. To me, texting is not social media and it aides in communication.

I believe social media actually promotes communication and is barely destroying anything. Then again, that is just my opinion.

By Alex Ludy

The art of communication is a complex one. Since the first humans began formulating languages millions of years ago, it has been changing and developing in ways that people may have never expected.

Social media is not destroying how people interact with each other, it is just changing it. Many people, especially those who have not grown up after the advent of smartphones and social media, believe that online communication has caused kids and young adults to be unable to talk to each other and become less social.

The idea that kids are unable to be social and talk to others effectively is contradictory to what social media actually intends to do. Thanks to online sites such as Tumblr and Twitter, kids of the modern era are more social than ever and are learning to communicate in new and exciting ways.

These sites have given not only children, but all people, the ability to connect with anyone around the world. This ease of access to new ideas and exciting cultures only facilitates communication and brings our global community together, an exhilarating opportunity that is unique to the time we live in.

Just because the way people are communicating changes doesn’t mean they are any less proficient in that communication. Critics argue that the quality of this interaction is significantly less, but that’s frankly untrue. What is the difference between having a forced conversation at the dinner table and having a seemingly meaningless conversation via text message; at least the latter is genuine.

It seems that often times people who do not understand new forms of communication blame their inability to connect with the younger generation on that new way of interacting rather than on their lack of communication skills. Social media is not damaging communication.

Online and instant communication is still uncharted territory, and while it may pose many questions on how we experience and interact with our world, it is only making the world a smaller place while simultaneously expanding it.

The real problem communication faces today is the danger that comes with the unwillingness of many to embrace new ideas and ways of interacting with each other.

By Hattie Luster

In our technologically dependent world today, people are constantly buried in their social media, oblivious to the real world. This phenomenon results in the hindrance of most individuals’ communication skills. Social media is inhibiting our young population’s ability to communicate.

A large factor of social media that cannot be ignored is cyberbullying. The many forms of social media that surround us today open the door for vicious attacks on individuals without direct contact. Because young people can now antagonize others without facing them in person, the verbal bullying in our society has increased drastically, all while the attacker sits behind a phone or laptop, never facing consequences.

Social media is also hurting our communication skills as it is inhibiting the ability of today’s youth to communicate face to face. Most young people today don’t know how to talk to someone unless they’re limited to 144 characters or less. Interviews are a nightmare for many young people because they haven’t been exposed to real conversations with other people.

Because of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and many other forms of crippling social media, the young citizens of America are going to be blindsided when they are thrown into the real world upon completion of school. I don’t see any reasonable simple solution to this problem, as our world has unfortunately been consumed by an addiction to social media.

By Veronica Sheriff

Shanksville Stonycreek

Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are all prevailing in today’s society. These websites are useful in providing information about friends and family, local and international news, having place to store your picture memories and so much more. As entertaining as these may be, there is a downfall of using too much social media.

Ever since smartphones and tablets took off, so has social media. One in every four adolescents admit being “cell-mostly” internet users according to Pewinternet.org. With all of that internet usage, we can only imagine how much of it is going toward social media.

With the amount of social media being used daily, it’s easy to assume it’s affecting communication among peoples’ lives. Social media has become a security blanket to the users of these internet sites.

Social media has become a crutch, and many hide behind it rather than engaging face to face in a conversation. Because of this, speaking skills are going to suffer. Poor speaking skills impair all of those around. It will make someone who may be highly intelligent seem ineligible in a work environment.

Social media can be a wonderful leisure activity if used in a respective manner, it should not however becoming anything more than that.

By Addie Best

Interaction on social media has become a part of many people’s daily lives — much like the real life conversations in which they take part.

In my opinion, social media isn’t destroying communication skills; it is merely altering and diversifying them. This alteration may not be beneficial for developing social skills, manners, and grammar, however, it does expand communication opportunities.

Unlike previous decades where it took days or weeks for a message to be posted, today, social media offers the opportunities to speedily contact or share information with far-away friends and family.

Also, a well-spoken and communicative teenager could easily also have an online presence with no negative impact on his or her face-to-face encounters.

All in all, social media may negatively impact some aspects of 21st century life; however, communication skills may be broadened by social media.

By Lindsay Walker

Just this morning, I woke up to a Facebook message from a former classmate. While this may not seem like an extraordinary occurrence in and of itself, the details surrounding it are what makes it extraordinary.

The message I received came to me at 2:40 a.m. from Ishimbay, Russia. In the early hours of the morning, I was able to communicate with my best friend, who just so happens to live halfway around the world.

Now, take the story I just told you and apply it to a time 100, 50, or even 20 ago. It would be next to impossible for it to have occurred, but today it did, thanks to social media.

Now, let’s be honest with ourselves, social media gets a bad reputation when it comes to communication skills. All too often, the younger demographic is accused with being absorbed in the many social media platforms offered to them: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter.

The list goes on and on. But the truth of the matter is, social media is not destroying communication skills, but is helping to build and enhance them. For example: when has it ever been as easy as a few keystrokes to get in touch with someone halfway around the world?

Or, on a smaller scale, simply being able to send a message to a group of people to organize a get-together? Before social media, it would have taken much longer to send a letter to Russia or get in touch with each individual person, by which time, many other variables can occur.

Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram also offer communication options. A situation that used to happen to me far too often is seeing something I know someone else would enjoy, but not being able to show it to them, then having to offer a weak description of what it was I saw.

With Snapchat, I can take a photo and send it to the person within seconds, possibly making their day a little brighter.

While social media is often the scapegoat for what are altogether issues varying from person to person, one should keep in mind the doors of communication social media offers before pointing fingers.

By Tristan Wiltrout

Salisbury-Elk Lick

Social media isn’t destroying communication skills, it’s just changing them. Interaction via social media is still interaction between two or more conscious human beings, and nothing about it makes it inherently worse than other forms of communication.

Has social media destroyed direct face-to-face communication skills for some people? Possibly. Still, it seems rare that somebody who feels comfortable with everyday conversation and interaction with other people would become worse at that as a result of using social media.

I feel like when this question is brought up, people imagine four millennials sitting around a table, staring at their phones rather than talking to each other. It’s a pretty common image nowadays, but how often does it actually come up in real life? Do people really stare at their phones out of habit?

Would they talk to each other if they weren’t staring at their phones? And if they would talk to each other, would they be doing it because they really want to, or out of a feeling of obligation? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but they seem important to keep in mind when thinking or discussing this topic.

By Alexandra Davis

Berlin Brothersvalley

In today’s world, technology is at our fingertips as communication with people has never been easier; however, are we losing the real communication skills behind all of the social media? Social media is destroying our communication skills.

I can’t watch TV without seeing an advertisement for some online dating site. Christian Mingle, EHarmony, Farmers Only, Black People Meet, the list goes on and on. The growing popularity of dating sites is one of the many testimonies to the fact that social media is ruining our communication skills.

People are so glued to their phones that they have forgotten how to communicate, or in this case how to go out and meet people. With every new social media that appears, fewer and fewer face to face conversations become the norm.

By Katie Oakes

I do believe that social media is destroying communication skills. For example, when I go to a restaurant with my family or friends, I look around and notice that almost every person in that restaurant is playing a game on their cell phone, texting, or talking on the phone.

People do not communicate by talking face to face anymore. Texting and social media have taken over; it is turning people into zombies. When I was little I would be outside playing or in my room. When supper was ready they would yell to let me know it was done, but now it’s texting, “Come eat, supper is ready.” Why have we let our society come to this?

“Since teenagers spend so much time interacting with their peers through social media and texting, they now lack the face-to-face communications needed to be successful and confident in the work force,” said my instructor Tanis Herwig.

I believe that in the next couple of years, society will be nothing but technology and no one will communicate verbally. We will all be like robots.

By Emma Rugg

I do not feel as though social media is destroying communication skill any more than it is expanding the ways of communication. The world will continue to evolve and advance technologically, whether it can be stopped or not.

Yes, maybe individuals are not developing as many personal interaction skills as they would 25 or even 50 years ago, but social media is allowing us to communicate with people from across the world. There are people that I have met and know from different states and even countries.

In these situations personal interaction is almost impossible, technology and the elements that come along with it. Yes, people could increase their interpersonal communication skills if there was less hype over texting, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites but they are expanding the connections through out the world.

Friends and families can stay in touch even if they are on opposite end of the world. Life will continue to go on and put forth new ideas when it comes to communication but if we keep a happy medium when it comes to both interaction and internet we would not have to worry about losing any skills at all.

The Prospector

Social media destroying social skills.

Haley Jensen , Staff Writer | January 25, 2013

Photo by Blogtrepreneur

Teenagers text at the dinner table. They tweet walking to class. They check Facebook on dates. Many of them have become so dependent on technology that they struggle interacting with people in real life. Their only means of communication are through texting and emails.  Social skills are lacking in a majority of high school students and social media seems to be impacting this.

A study by Stanford University showed that applications like Facebook, Twiter,  and FaceTime are not a replacement for real human interaction. 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 were surveyed for the study. It was concluded that young girls who spend an excessive amount of time using these devices will struggle to develop normal social skills.

Bingham High School psychologist Clinton Thurgood said, “I do feel that technology is having a great impact on teen’s social abilities. There is a lot less face to face interaction than in past generations and teens choose to spend time with computers and video games instead of out with friends.”

Teens are becoming uncomfortable with in-person confrontations of any kind, even talking over the phone. It is less threatening to text someone or send them a Facebook message. Actually hearing someone’s voice and making eye contact is starting to become a thing of the past. If someone is shy or awkward, they will probably have a hard time talking to someone in person. They can have the same conversation via text message or email. It is easier for them to maintain a flow of conversation when they have time to think of a response.

“When texting you can be yourself, but in person, it is easy to close up and that makes it hard to express what you feel,” said senior Tiana Warner

Texting also lacks personality and tone. Saying “whatever” in a text could mean, “anything you want” or “stop talking to me.”  Today’s teenagers are losing valuable opportunities to practice in-person interactions that are needed to develop good social skills. Skills, like being comfortable around new people or dealing with customers at a job, are needed in everyday life. Many teens do not understand how to use body language to portray what they mean. Body language and facial expressions add an emotional element to conversations that are missing from social media. Meaningful relationships are never going to develop over a computer screen.

When talking to someone over the Internet or through a text, people often get the courage to fire off statements they would not dare say to someone away from the screen.

Senior T.j. Wenner said, “It’s a lot easier to say something over the phone than it is to say it face to face.”

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WilliamJ • Feb 9, 2013 at 3:44 am

I am a 35 year old who never had social skills, before everyone was online throwing around Likes and LoLs. I was backward, a nerd when it was considered a bad thing and not a fashion statement, and socially awkward down to my every neurological wiring.

As much as I hate to admit it, that carries over into the current online social media world just as it did in reality, in my experience. From where I stand, I could peruse all of the social media I could ingest, 5 hours a day, and still sink like a stone as far as making or maintaining friendships by that medium. In contrast, all the ones I’ve known who did well socializing in the real world, are the ones who seem to be the most affluent social networkers.

The interesting thing is, before all of those people got “connected” and online, they’d thumb their noses at nerds like me and those who occupied and chatted in rooms and message boards in the 90s, before it became socially acceptable to “talk to people on the internet”. It was considered downright lowly and pathetic.

Back then, I had no problem finding like minds to communicate with online. Now that everyone and their grandma’s dog (literally) is wired up, it’s worse than my worst year of high school online, and better in the real world for me, socially. (Better by no means being “good'” or successful, just less painful).

Of course back then, complete sentences and even paragraphs were used even in daily convo, not tweets n lols. It was a completely different crowd, and everyone had their own voice, as opposed to parakeeting where you can’t tell one person from the next. It was also the worst idea in the world to share your full name in public. Now not doing so breeds contempt and suspicion, which is only natural, in a world where comprehension and context is devolved and destroyed.

Just thought I’d put my own perspective on this out there.

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Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

Many blame social media for poor mental health among teenagers, but the science is murky

If Jordy had a switch to instantly shut down social media, she would flip it.

"I'd switch it off, 100 per cent, even if it was for a week, just so people could have that taste of what it would be like," she said.

Now in her first year out of school, the 18-year-old studies nursing at university and works at a local cafe in Charleville, a small town 745 kilometres west of Brisbane, where she has lived most of her life.

Like Australian teenagers everywhere, she has another life online.

"It's like a second world, really," she said.

"You have reality and then you have social media — two extremely different things."

At the moment, she spends an average of five-and-a-half hours a day on her phone, but it's lower than her peak during high school.

"When I first got a phone I was on it constantly, probably like seven hours, eight hours a day," she said.

She has cut back since then because that second world was not always kind, especially when it came to body image — and despite the fact her parents were always strict about phone usage.

"Growing up, I've always been a big girl … and a sporty person — I'm pretty healthy," she said.

"But when we see images, it tends to be just very thin, skinny people.

"It can just take you down, with the click of your fingers."

Jordy was also being bullied at school, but social media meant it could happen around the clock, no matter where she was.

"A group of boys at my school had tagged me on TikTok telling me to go kill myself," she said.

"It was just so heartbreaking. I was just like, 'I go to school with you every day, we've never had an issue in the past.' That's probably the worst thing that's happened."

Jordy's mental health was tanking, and she began to withdraw from activities she used to love, like footy training or seeing friends.

"I just felt so scared to talk to my mum … I was just like, 'I don't want my mum to think I'm using social media the wrong way'," she said.

No matter how bad things got, logging off still felt impossible.

"It was like that fear of missing out, I guess. I think that's the addiction thing, right?" she said.

"You sort of just have to be on your phone to socialise."

Does more screen time cause worse mental health in teenagers?

Teen mental health has deteriorated at an accelerating rate in the last two decades — more or less exactly since social media and smartphones started to become widespread in 2007.

For obvious reasons, many people, especially concerned parents, have leapt to the conclusion that tech is the culprit.

But the science is surprisingly murky, even though there is a link — research shows more screen time is associated with higher rates of depression in adolescents.

"What we know about the link is there's a link, and that's pretty much what we know," said Aliza Werner-Seidler, a senior researcher at the Black Dog Institute.

"We have really good correlational data, there is a strong linear relationship, particularly in young girls.

"What we don't know is about causation — so is young people's mental health leading them to spend more time on social media and screens, or is it actually the other way around?

"We don't know the direction of the effect."

Dr Werner-Seidler is one of thousands of researchers around the world trying to solve that mystery.

Even if many people are convinced they already know the answer because of their own experience online.

"Personally I would say that it's both," Jordy said.

After a session doomscrolling perfect bodies on TikTok, she "would feel horrible" about herself.

"But then I'd continue to use it and then it made me feel even worse."

After 17 years, why don't we have the answers yet?

Despite 17 years of widespread smartphones and social media, researchers still don't have enough data to definitively say whether they're to blame for deteriorating teen mental health.

Getting those long-term studies done is particularly difficult because trends, algorithms and habits change so quickly.

"When I started this work, TikTok wasn't even a thing … Snapchat, really has only taken off in the last decade or so," Dr Werner-Seidler said.

"It's a very fast-moving field. And so it's very, very difficult to get a handle on it before the next thing comes out."

Part of the problem is that studies have focused on overall screen time, instead of looking at what people were doing online.

"Are they FaceTiming with Grandma? Are they viewing distressing content? Are they being groomed online?" Dr Werner-Seidler said.

"This idea of nuance and it matters what people do and how they do it and how long for and with whom.

"We can't tell any of this information just by looking at how long young people spend on screens."

What social media companies know but don't say

The National Mental Health Commission has been investigating the relationship between digital tech and teen mental health.

On Friday it released its findings after months of consultation, noting the lack of longitudinal evidence and calling for further research to be made a "top priority".

Frustratingly for Dr Werner-Seidler, and other researchers in this area, the data that might solve the mystery does exist — but they can't access it.

"Big tech companies have all of this information," she said.

"If they were to share it with academics and scientists, we would be able to learn so much more, so much more quickly."

The data that has so far emerged in other ways, courtesy of lawsuits and whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen in 2021, has been disturbing.

Ms Haugen, a former Facebook employee, revealed detailed internal research showing Instagram was harmful for teenage girls.

One slide from an in-house presentation reportedly said: "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."

The peak body for Australia's technology industry — whose members include social media companies Meta, Snapchat and TikTok — has defended the sector's contribution to public research.

"DIGI's relevant members have long-standing research and community partnerships in mental health and online safety, and specific policies … informed by that work," a spokesperson said.

Depending on the platform, those policies might include parental controls, avenues to report inappropriate content and seek help, customisable settings, and age limits.

Adherence to those age limits has been mostly voluntary, and the federal government is spending $6.5 million on an age verification trial in the hopes of introducing a higher standard of proof.

Some social media companies are trying to get ahead of any future legislation.

Facebook's parent company Meta announced this week it would no longer allow Facebook users to edit their birthdate to say they're over 18 without verification — a feature that's been in place on Instagram in Australia since last year.

A window for change

The public and political mood when it comes to big tech has rarely been darker.

"I've never seen the appetite [for change] as strong as it is right now," said Alice Dawkins, executive director of Reset Tech Australia.

She says there's a window for change with the federal government currently reviewing its key legislation, the Online Safety Act.

"Our online safety laws are geared at protecting people from [one] another online … [but] there's virtually nothing that can be done about protecting people from the tech itself."

As it stands, companies are rarely obliged to share information on how their products, and not just the people using them, may cause harm.

"It's highly exceptional — think about other sectors, like food, like medicine, like toys — it's incredibly routine in those sectors to have risk assessment and risk mitigation of products," Ms Dawkins said.

"There's compounding public awareness of the problem … it's never been a more appropriate time for the government to legislate."

Dr Werner-Seidler said that for now, internal data was being used by big tech to keep users scrolling for as long as possible.

"These are commercial big companies [and] they use a whole bunch of engagement strategies to keep people coming back, and that is their goal," she said.

The conversation you need to have with your kids

Jordy eventually found the courage to tell her mum what was happening to her online.

"When it got really bad I was just like, 'Mum, I need to show you … this is what's happening.'"

After that, her parents insisted she cut back her screen time but, despite everything that had already happened, she still fought it.

"I was so mean to her … I would get so angry, I'd be like, 'Mum, it's not your life,'" she said.

But that was before Jordy noticed a big improvement in her mood and her grades.

"I'm thankful every day that my mum did what she did.

"You can't ever change the fact that your kids are going to use social media," said Jordy, although boundaries were useful in her case.

"Saying to your kids, 'What are you using social media for? Why do you have to be on social media?'

"For parents out there that are struggling, I think it's that conversation you need to have with your kids.

"As a kid, you're going to get frustrated, but it's really just parents trying to protect their kids from what's out there."

Mental health disorders among young people have soared by nearly 50 per cent in 15 years. The ABC is talking to youth, parents, and researchers about what's driving this pattern, and what can be done to turn things around.

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The Impact of Social Media Use on Social Skills

J Ryan Fuller, Ph.D.

Guide to social media use on social skills.

Engaging in various forms of social media has become a routine daily activity for most children and adolescents . According to a survey, 22% of teenagers log on to their favorite social media site more than 10 times a day and more than half of adolescents log on to a social media site more than once a day (Common Sense Media, 2009).

75% of teenagers own cell phones, and 25% use them for social media, 54% for texting and 24% for instant messaging (Hinduja & Patchin, 2007). Children, ages 8-18, spend over 7.5 hours a day, 7 days a week using media sites outside of school (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberst, 2010). Teenagers, between the ages of 12-17, report using text messages in their daily lives more than any other form of communication , including face-to-face interaction (Lenhart, 2010).

A large part of this generation’s social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and cell phones. All the time that children and teenagers spend on the web and more specifically social media sites, takes time away from face-to-face communication and in-person activities (Giedd, 2012).

According to a study, from 1997 to 2003, the amount of kids’ non-screen playtime decreased by 20%, while screen activities (TV, computer, videogames, etc.) increased (Hofferth, 2010). Children’s access to electronic devices has grown fivefold in two years (Common Sense Media, 2013) and they engage with screens almost all day long and in many different settings such as cars, restaurants, vacations, and even in the bedroom.

Benefits of Using Social Media Sites

Social media sites provide children with the opportunity to stay connected to friends and family, make new friends, share pictures and exchange ideas. Children can also engage in their communities by raising money for charities, develop their creativity through sharing their art or music, and get to know others from diverse backgrounds through shared interests (Boyd, 2008). Social media sites also offer enhanced learning opportunities.

Some schools use blogs as teaching tools with the benefit of improving English skills, writing and creativity. Facebook and other similar sites allow students to gather outside of school and exchange ideas about assignments or collaborate on group projects (Borja, 2005).

Risks of Using Social Media

Using social media can often become a risk for adolescents even more than adults realize.

Cyberbullying refers to using digital media to communicate false, embarrassing or hostile information about another person and it is the most common risk for all teens (Lenhart, 2007). Cyberbullying can happen to anyone and often causes psychological problems such as depression, anxiety , isolation and even suicide (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010).

20% of teens have sent or posted nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves online (National Campaign to Treat and Prevent Unplanned Pregnancy, 2008). This phenomenon is known as sexting. Many such images or videos get distributed rapidly online and can incur felony child pornography charges as well as school suspensions and emotional distress for the victims (Lenhart, 2009).

‘Facebook depression ’ is a new term that refers to depression that develops as a result of children and teens spending a lot of time on social media sites and begin to experience depression as a result. When teens compare themselves to photos of others and the illusion of others’ better lives, they can experience decreased self-esteem and depression. Depression, in turn, puts these children at risk for social isolation and seeking help from risky online websites and blogs that may promote unhealthy coping mechanisms including substance use, unsafe sex, or self-destructive behaviors.

Many children and adolescents do not understand the fact that everything they do online leaves a ‘digital footprint’. This can hurt their future reputation, hurt their job or college application and follow them forever.

Social Media Use and Social Skills

When we engage in face-to-face communication, social information is conveyed by vocal and visual cues in the context of the situation. Non-verbal communication is an important part of communicating and it includes facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice as well as posture, space between individuals, etc. (Knapp & Hall, 2010).

Understanding the non-verbal aspects of communication is crucial because social situations we need to modify our behavior in response to the reactions of others (Knapp & Hall, 2010). Our ability to process emotional cues is associated with personal, social and academic success (Knapp & Hall, 2010).

Moreover, children who understand emotional cues in social settings can develop superior social skills and more positive peer relationships (Blakemore, 2003). These non-verbal, affective cues are much stronger when it comes to communicating in person vs. digitally (Sherman, Michikyan, & Greenfeld, 2013). So when children use digital communication extensively, it can curtail the face-to-face experiences necessary for them to develop and master important social skills (Giedd, 2012).

The term ‘video deficit’ was created as a result of many studies that confirm that young children learn better from live interaction than from screens. In a 2003 study, both live and videotaped models performed a series of actions with rattles and stuffed animals in front of children. Although children imitated both the in-person and videotaped models, their imitation scores were significantly higher in the live condition. This difference in imitation is present until 30 months of age in most children (Hayne, Herbert, & Simcock, 2003).

Impact of Face-to-face Communication

Furthermore, face-to-face communication (specifically eye contact and pointing) is crucial when teaching children about social interaction and the world around them. Children learn from cues such as pointing when interacting socially (Moore & Dunham, 1995). Many means of learning are really only available to children when they see a person’s face and physical being (Gross & Ballif, 1991). Children’s acquisition of skill in reading non-verbal cues also depends on in-person peer interactions, siblings when they are younger and friends and peers as they get older (Bosacki & Astington, 1999).

In a recent study, a group of children spent 5 days in a camp without access to any screen-based or electronic communication and being limited to only in-person interaction (a control group stayed at home with access to all electronic devices). It seemed that the time participants spent engaging with other children and adults face-to-face made an important difference.

The children’s in-person interaction improved significantly in terms of reading facial emotions, while the control group’s skills remained the same. The results suggest that digital screen time, even when used for social interaction, can reduce the time spent developing skills to read non-verbal cues of human emotion (Uhls et al., 2014).

If you’re interested in learning more about social media use, please feel free to read the second part of this series below:

Social Media Use and Self-Esteem

Social Media Use and Social Skills References

Schurgin O’Keeffe, G. & Clarke-Pearson, K. (2011). The impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families. Pediatrics, 127, 800-804.

Common Sense Media. Is Technology Networking Changing Childhood? A National Poll. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media; 2009.Available at: www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/CSM_teen_social_media_080609_ FINAL.pdf. Accessed July 16, 2010

Hinduja S, Patchin J. Offline consequences of online victimization: school violence and delinquency. J Sch Violence. 2007;6(3):89–112

Hinduja S, Patchin JW. Bullying, cyberbullying, and suicide. Arch Suicide Res. 2010;14(3):206–221.

Boyd D. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked PublicsBerkeley, CA: University of California; 2008.

Borja RR. “Blogs” catching on as tool for instruction: teachers use interactive Web pages to hone writing skills. Educ Week. December14, 2005.

Lenhart A. Cyberbullying. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center; 2007.Available at: www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Cyberbullying.aspx. Accessed July 16, 2010

Lenhart A, Purcell K, Smith A, Zickur K. Social Media and Young Adults. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center; 2010.Available at: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx. Accessed July 16, 2010

National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Sex and Tech: Results of a Survey of Teens and Young Adults. Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy; 2008. Available at: www.thenationalcampaign.org/ SEXTECH/PDF/SexTech_Summary.pdf. Accessed July 16, 2010

Uhls, Y.T., Michikyan, M., Morris, J., Garcia, D., Small, G.W., Zgourou, E., & Greenfield, P.M. (2014). Computers in Human Behavior, 39, 387-392.

Rideout, V. J., Foehr, U. G., & Roberts, D. F. (2010). Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8–18 year-olds. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation.

Giedd, J. N. (2012). The digital revolution and adolescent brain evolution. Journal of Adolescent Health, 51, 101–105.

Hofferth, S. L. (2010). Home media and children’s achievement and behavior. Child Development, 81, 1598–1619.

Knapp, M. L, & Hall, J. A (2010). Nonverbal communication in human interaction (Seventh.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Blakemore, S. J. (2003). How does the brain deal with the social world? Neuro Report, 14, 1–10.?

Sherman, L. E., Michikyan, M., & Greenfeld, P. M. (2013). The effects of text, audio, video, and in-person communication on bonding between friends. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 7. Article 3.

Hayne, H., Herbert, J., & Simcock, G. (2003). Imitation from television by 24- and 30- month-olds. Developmental Science, 6, 254–261.

Gross, A. L., & Ballif, B. (1991). Children’s understanding of emotion from facial expression and situations: A review. Developmental Review, 11, 368–398.

Moore, C., & Dunham, P. J. (Eds.). (1995). Joint attention: Its origins and role in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.?

Bosacki, S., & Astington, J. W. (1999). Theory of mind in preadolescence: Relations between social understanding and social competence. Social Development, 8, 237–255.

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Is Tech Destroying Kids’ Social Skills? Here’s How Social-Emotional Learning Can Help

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Technology’s effect on children’s social skills and well-being has caused a lot of hand-wringing over the years—and parents’ and educators’ concerns have only grown with the pandemic as students have done more socializing and learning on their digital devices.

Social media, virtual learning, online gaming, and ubiquitous devices present new social challenges for kids. So, what social-emotional skills do they need to flourish in an increasingly tech-centric world, and are schools teaching them?

Many schools are teaching key skills such as empathy, perspective-taking, and self-management, said Kelly Mendoza, the vice president of education programs at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that also provides curricula and ratings on media and technology. However, the wrinkle is that educators are not always explicitly connecting those skills with tech use.

One reason could be that a lot of SEL curricula uses face-to-face examples in instructional materials and in exercises, said Mendoza.

“And I wonder if there is a generation gap and the adults teaching these skills don’t think of all of the challenges that kids face online or are even aware of them,” she said. “I’m sure they could make the SEL connections, but [these connections] may not be top of mind because adults are not participating online as much.”

But that disconnect, said Mendoza, means that students may not apply or adapt these all-critical social-emotional skills they are learning in school to their digital lives.

Their digital lives, too, are fused with their offline lives in a way that is foreign to many adults, said Michael Rich, a pediatrician and the director of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“This generation of young people live in an environment where they move seamlessly from the digital and physical world,” he said. Their teachers and parents, however, often see two worlds: one digital and one real.

How technology influences kids’ social-emotional development

It’s in this hybrid digital and analog world that kids are developing their identities, building relationships, learning to regulate their emotions and actions, and navigating an onslaught of false information. They are also spending a lot more time in the digital realm than they were before the pandemic, a recent survey by Common Sense Media found .

Kids are constantly performing for others on social media, and their identity development is highly subjected to others' feedback.

While the social-emotional skills students need to do well in school and the workplace are many of the same they need to be good digital citizens, technology presents new challenges.

Students need to be self-aware and able to manage their emotions, said Melissa Schlinger, the vice president of practice and programs at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL. There is a lot of emotional content on social media that goads kids (and adults) to click first and think later—commenting or sharing a video, meme, or story without evaluating its accuracy or the repercussions of their actions.

“One component of SEL is to make sure that we are slowing down, and managing those impulses, and understanding what we’re reading,” she said. “Is this something to share? Is it helpful? And that self-management piece is a key strength that we need in this digital space.”

Teachers also need to coach kids to actively pay attention to how they are using media and technology and how it makes them feel, said Mendoza. Do they feel energized or lonely after playing video games? Do they feel confident or bad about themselves after scrolling through social media? Did they miss sleep, or a chance to interact with friends or family in person because of technology?

Maintaining supportive relationships and developing healthy identities can also be more challenging online. People often behave differently when interacting with screens instead of face-to-face, which can lead to cyberbullying and can carry over into in-person interactions.

“What we want to do is bring the personal piece back so that we can tap into our empathy,” said Schlinger. “So, remembering that there are people on the other side of this exchange and trying to focus on being empathic and imagining how different perspectives are reacting and different consequences are affecting different people.”

Building that capacity for empathy in the digital space is important for maintaining healthy relationships online, she said.

Social-emotional learning as it relates to tech shouldn’t focus on just the short-term consequences of hurt feelings or sharing disinformation. Another important skill for students: being able to game out the long-term consequences of actions and how what they say or share online today could derail a job application or scholarship award down the line or destroy a relationship.

This is true, also, for younger children as more of them join social media.

“Young children’s executive function is not developed enough to understand privacy,” said Rich, the pediatrician. “To them, privacy is mom and dad can’t see it. They don’t think about the rest of the world.”

Much of SEL focuses on identity development, said Mendoza, and how students develop healthy identities online should be a part of that exploration in the classroom.

“Kids are constantly performing for others on social media, and their identity development is highly subjected to others’ feedback,” said Mendoza. “Then there is a social comparison, that’s huge, where you’re scrolling and looking and everything is perfect or airbrushed, and kids struggle with this social comparison all of the time.”

While social media is certainly a dominant technology in children’s lives, it’s not the only one creating challenges for kids, families, and educators. There’s online gaming and also a rise in tech use for schoolwork. Families can struggle with the ubiquitous use of digital devices, said Mendoza.

“What I heard from some parents is that they felt like the school is sending this device home, and they felt like, well, it’s not my device, so they felt like they almost had less authority over it,” she said. “I think there is a struggle, and I don’t know what the solution is, around having kids do homework, which is all online nowadays, and then so much of their time is on screens already for their personal use, and it’s just a heck of a lot of screen time.”

There are a few broad ways schools can start being more conscious about teaching social-emotional skills for tech use.

To begin with, “schools can deliberately carve out time for these lessons around explicit skill building around SEL and digital citizenship,” said Nick Woolf, the social and emotional learning coordinator for the Burlington School District in Vermont.

However, as schools do this, educators should be aware that there has been rapid growth of online and app-based social-emotional learning programs during the pandemic, warned Woolf, many of which are not vetted. It’s important for educators to make sure they are using programs that are evidence-based and age-appropriate, he said.

As with much SEL programming, secondary students —especially high schoolers—tend to be an afterthought, said Woolf, and it can be hard to find good curricula and resources geared to older students. This is particularly problematic given that this age group needs these supports the most as they navigate technology.

One way to address this, said Woolf, is to consult high school students on their social-emotional learning needs as it relates to tech. As digital natives, they have a better grasp on their needs than the adults often do, he said.

Schools should also seek student input on tech policies in their school—such as around smartphone use—as a way both to craft more-meaningful policies and to get students involved in the process, Woolf recommends. Student voice, or giving students avenues to have a say in how their school is run, is a tenet of SEL.

Easing the tension between technology and social-emotional development

For a long time, technology and social-emotional learning were thought of as distinct things, sometimes even at odds with one another because technology was seen as undermining students’ social skills.

But the pandemic has forced schools to think about delivering social-emotional learning and other well-being supports in new ways, said Woolf. And while social-emotional learning can help support healthy tech use, the reverse is also true, if often overlooked: tech can also support SEL.

There are app-based check-in tools—such as mood meters—where students tap an emoji that depicts their current mood and, depending upon what they select, link to a related mindfulness activity. This is less work for teachers than the traditional paper mood meters, said Woolf, and it makes it far easier for the district to collect and see trends across the data.

Data management programs with dashboards also make it easier for schools to collect and analyze data important to understanding the social-emotional needs and abilities of students, said Schlinger of CASEL. Survey data on whether students feel engaged, connected, or safe in school can be easily broken down by gender, age, race, income status, and other factors.

As with a lot of other technology products and services, these advancements bring with them significant privacy concerns.

“I have heard from a lot of parents and teachers, if we’re going to ask students about how they are feeling, that could be bringing up sensitive information,” Woolf said.

Technology can help educators in other ways, said Schlinger. Zoom and other video conference tools have made it easier for teachers to meet with parents, building up those all-crucial relationships, said Schlinger and they have made PD opportunities—including those to improve SEL—more accessible to teachers.

While technology has created new challenges for kids’ social-emotional development—and for educators teaching these skills—it’s not helpful to think of the two as distinct or in tension with one another, said Schlinger.

“Technology is not going away so we need to provide our young people with these skills,” she said.

Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.

A version of this article appeared in the April 13, 2022 edition of Education Week as Is Tech Destroying Kids’ Social Skills? Here’s How Social-Emotional Learning Can Help

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How Social Media affects Communication Skills?

This paper summarizes the effects of social media on hindering communication skills and reducing social activity in the world. Each reason is supported by evidence by referring to four published books and some articles online. It focuses mainly on social media via the Web, such as, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, to which many of the youth are exposed to nowadays, and this exposure has led to addiction. This paper informs people about the issue of social media affecting communication skills and calls for means to solve this problem.

The Effects of Social Media on Communication Skills

Rebecca Javeleau, a 15 year-old Facebook user, meant to invite her 15 closest friends to her birthday party but ended up inviting over 20,000 people, 8000 of which RSVP’d for the event. The birthday girl went into hiding when more than 1500 guests showed up and around 100 police officers were needed to keep the crowd under control. Did these 21000 people really know the girl? Are they really considered as "friends" of hers'? Modern society seems convinced that social media like Twitter and Facebook keep people connected and grow their social skills with friends and peers.

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But what actually these social networking sites are doing to people is that they're mutually isolating networks that part people from meaningful interactions with one another and make them less human. Many scholars see new communication technology as a threat to the discipline of interpersonal communication (Konijn et al. , 2008). Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and other applications are hampering our social skills. Social networking sites deteriorate communication skills because people forget proper manners as they constantly use these sites.

The more time these people spend on social sites, the less time they will have to spend socializing in person. Socializing via social sites lacks body signals and other nonverbal cues such as voice quality, tone, facial expressions, and many others, therefore it isn't an adequate replacement for face-to-face communication since these people won't be able to communicate and socialize effectively in person with one another. In the real world, effective communication skills are key to success.

A month ago, I received a friend request from a Facebook user whom I didn't know. After some days of chatting and better knowing each other, we decided to meet in person and have a real conversation. When we met in a cafe at around noon, we greeted one another and sat in our places. It was very embarrassing when we spent half an hour staring at each other and not knowing what to talk about. That is when I realized that these social networking sites are truly hindering our social interactions and the development of strong communication skills.

According to Konijn's "Researchers speculated that CMC would lead to the sharing of impersonal messages due to the lack of facial and tonal cues”. Therefore we can say that social media causes effects on a person’s ability to communicate in a proper manner, which includes body signals, voice, and other cues. As Dimbleby R. & Burton G. state it (1992), “Body language tells us a lot about people's feelings, attitudes, and intentions”. Moreover, NVC such as body signals relates to our perception of others and relates to the idea of feedback.

Another reason why these social networking sites are reducing communication skills is that they lack the practice of active listening which is needed during conversations in the real world. Great communication skills take practice and that can't be done by sitting on a sofa and typing on your computer or cellphone, it can be done by appearing in person and actively communicate with one another. When the news spread all around that an application was available in the market, a free application through which anyone who shares contacts can chat with each other all day long without any payment.

This application was called "Whatsapp". My friends encouraged me to download and use this application. We spent hours and days sitting at home chatting with one another. It was time to go back to school. When the teacher actually asked us to have a dialogue in the class, I realized that it was easier for me to chat on my phone instead of speaking out loud in front of everyone, which was pretty difficult to handle.

It wasn't only my case, as the whole class was addicted to these kinds of applications or messengers or sites, that cause people to be like robots, typing all day long, while a phone call could make it easier for them to save time and save energy. I believe these applications or whatsoever destroyed our ability to communicate in face-to-face interactions. In a European study of 635 participants ages 16-55 years old who visited a website and completed an online questionnaire, 48. 9% reported preferring to use their cell phones for texting over voice calls and 26. 1% reported texting too much. This study also measured levels of loneliness, expressive control, interaction anxiousness, and conversational involvement.

Two significant findings were that 61% of the participants stated they say things in the text that they would not feel comfortable saying face-to-face and 64% stated they feel they are able to express their true feelings best in text messages rather than in face-to-face interactions or voice calls (Reid & Reid, 2007). Social media hinders communication skills because it leads to isolation. Social media from Facebook to Twitter have made us more densely connected than ever, yet for all this connectivity, we have never been lonelier and this loneliness is making us physically and mentally ill.

Some people choose to sit at home all day pretending to be someone they're not instead of going outside and having real conversations and interactions. Then, we can say that on social networks, everybody tries to come across at their very best often embellishing their profiles, making Facebook a reference group against which one starts to compare one's own popularity and success, which may lead to cases of depression and isolation if one finds the other more successful than himself/herself.

A recent observation done by myself on the issue of social media leading to isolation showed that people want to constantly be visible amongst their peers and be the best among all. Those who weren't able to have more "friends" than their peers were actually depressed and felt left out of the group. A tragic story alarms people of the issue of social media leading to isolation and depression when a 15-year-old girl hanged herself because her friends at school were bullying her and she felt lonely and her depression let her commit suicide.

Konijn et al (2008) study found the following: Being ignored or ostracized has negative psychological consequences. For example, ostracism has been associated with depressed mood, anxiety, loneliness, helplessness, invisibility, and frustration. Being ostracized threatens the basic human needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. This can be anything like unanswered emails, or being consistently ignored in a chat room. (p. 203) There are critics that say social networking sites lead to larger non-diverse social networks, hence increasing communication skills.

It is true that these networking sites make it easier for people to connect all around the world, but is that a cause to increase communication skills? Why, then, two people sitting in the same room chat on their iPhones together while they could have real face-to-face communication? Why do these people feel dead on one's feet to actually walk 10 seconds to the hallway to talk with their friends and have a real conversation? Even if these social networking sites lead to larger non-diverse social networks, are these relationships real?

How can you prove if the one you are communicating with is a person you can trust? According to Mintz et al. , (2012), “driven by younger, technologically savvy students, Myspace and Facebook have grown exponentially into sites where people can and do pretend to be who they aren't”. Another party criticizes the fact that these social networking sites are ruining communication skills by saying people use this technology to get in touch with one another and plan for a meeting.

In addition to that, they criticize by saying that internet users are more likely to visit a cafe or coffee shop than people who don't use the internet. Well, don't these people who visit coffee shops hold their laptops in their hands and sit browsing on the Internet while drinking a coffee or having a bite? If they really meant to plan a meeting and to interact with one another then why do these people leave their cellphones and laptops away from sight? How did technology make it easier for people to get in touch with one another?

Did it make it easier by allowing anyone to see one’s privacy and know every single detail about that person? Doesn’t this eventually lead to spam and identity theft? How can we protect ourselves from harmful remarks and actions when the identity of the perpetrator is unknown? As Konijn et al (2008) states, “by focusing on symbolic shifts, time/space relationships, interactivity, sensory bias, and conditions of attendance, media ecology provides a framework for understanding how interpersonal communication is shifted from face-to-face to mediated contexts” (p.20).

Social networking sites not only decrease the number of face-to-face interactions, but they greatly deplete the social skills that are important in any society. Facebook is a great tool to connect with one another but it is tech-deep and we need skin-deep, we need real actively involved connections and conversations. This trend causes human beings to become consumed by a virtual world while they're simultaneously pulled further away from reality.

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Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

Despite what Meta has to say.

W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack.

Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled .”

The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years .

So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health ) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible.

Let me back up. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid ,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.

I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls.

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks

All of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. A fourth group—Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions.

The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial—or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. There was also an essay in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who interviewed me and other scholars who study politics and social media. He argued that social media might well be harmful to democracies, but the research literature is too muddy and contradictory to support firm conclusions.

So was my diagnosis correct, or are concerns about social media overblown? It’s a crucial question for the future of our society. As I argued in my essay, critics make us smarter. I’m grateful, therefore, to Meta and the researchers interviewed by Lewis-Kraus for helping me sharpen and extend my argument in three ways.

Are Democracies Becoming More Polarized and Less Healthy?

My essay laid out a wide array of harms that social media has inflicted on society. Political polarization is just one of them, but it is central to the story of rising democratic dysfunction.

Meta questioned whether social media should be blamed for increased polarization. In response to my essay, Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, pointed to a study by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro that looked at trends in 12 countries and found, she said, “that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased.” In a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman , Mark Zuckerberg cited this same study in support of a more audacious claim: “Most of the academic studies that I’ve seen actually show that social-media use is correlated with lower polarization.”

Does that study really let social media off the hook? It plotted political polarization based on survey responses in 12 countries, most with data stretching back to the 1970s, and then drew straight lines that best fit the data points over several decades. It’s true that, while some lines sloped upward (meaning that polarization increased across the period as a whole), others sloped downward. But my argument wasn’t about the past 50 years. It was about a phase change that happened in the early 2010s , after Facebook and Twitter changed their architecture to enable hyper-virality.

I emailed Gentzkow to ask whether he could put a “hinge” in the graphs in the early 2010s, to see if the trends in polarization changed direction or accelerated in the past decade. He replied that there was not enough data after 2010 to make such an analysis reliable. He also noted that Meta’s response essay had failed to cite a 2020 article in which he and three colleagues found that randomly assigning participants to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced polarization.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. I discovered four. One of them found no overall trend in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and all three reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world.

One of them, a 2022 report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that “liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:

Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures.

The report also notes that “toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.

A paper published one week after my Atlantic essay, by Yunus E. Orhan, found a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side. When affective polarization is high, partisans tolerate antidemocratic behavior by politicians on their own side––such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index.

These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.

Has Social Media Created Harmful Echo Chambers?

So why did democracies weaken in the 2010s? How might social media have made them more fragmented and less stable? One popular argument contends that social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.

According to Meta, however, “More and more research discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber.” It points to two sources to back up that claim, but many studies show evidence that social media does in fact create echo chambers. Because conflicting studies are common in social-science research, I created a “ collaborative review ” document last year with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University who studies social media. It’s a public Google doc in which we organize the abstracts of all the studies we can find about social media’s impact on democracy, and then we invite other experts to add studies, comments, and criticisms. We cover research on seven different questions, including whether social media promotes echo chambers. After spending time in the document, Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker : “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.”

He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating three such documents , researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all. Even partisans end up being exposed to news stories and videos from the other side. Both of the sources that Raychoudhury cited in her defense of Meta mention this idea.

Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol

But researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves. One study of politically engaged Twitter users, for example, found that they “are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.” So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a 2018 essay . Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them.

These closely bonded groupings can have profound political ramifications, as a couple of my critics in the New Yorker article acknowledged. A major feature of the post-Babel world is that the extremes are now far louder and more influential than before. They may also become more violent. Recent research by Morteza Dehghani and his colleagues at the University of Southern California shows that people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous.

This finding seems to be borne out by a statement from the 18-year-old man who recently killed 10 Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo. In the Q&A portion of the manifesto attributed to him, he wrote:

Where did you get your current beliefs? Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.

The killer goes on to claim that he had read information “from all ideologies,” but I find it unlikely that he consumed a balanced informational diet, or, more important, that he hung out online with ideologically diverse users. The fact that he livestreamed his shooting tells us he assumed that his community shared his warped worldview. He could not have found such an extreme yet homogeneous group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.

Is Social Media the Primary Villain in This Story?

In her response to my essay, Raychoudhury did not deny that Meta bore any blame. Rather, her defense was two-pronged, arguing that the research is not yet definitive, and that, in any case, we should be focusing on mainstream media as the primary cause of harm.

Raychoudhury pointed to a study on the role of cable TV and mainstream media as major drivers of partisanship. She is correct to do so: The American culture war has roots going back to the turmoil of the 1960s, which activated evangelicals and other conservatives in the ’70s. Social media (which arrived around 2004 and became truly pernicious, I argue, only after 2009) is indeed a more recent player in this phenomenon.

In my essay, I included a paragraph on this backstory, noting the role of Fox News and the radicalizing Republican Party of the ’90s, but I should have said more. The story of polarization is complex, and political scientists cite a variety of contributing factors , including the growing politicization of the urban-rural divide; rising immigration; the increasing power of big and very partisan donors; the loss of a common enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed; and the loss of the “Greatest Generation,” which had an ethos of service forged in the crisis of the Second World War. And although polarization rose rapidly in the 2010s, the rise began in the ’90s, so I cannot pin the majority of the rise on social media.

But my essay wasn’t primarily about ordinary polarization. I was trying to explain a new dynamic that emerged in the 2010s: the fear of one another , even—and perhaps especially––within groups that share political or cultural affinities. This fear has created a whole new set of social and political problems.

The loss of a common enemy and those other trends with roots in the 20th century can help explain America’s ever nastier cross-party relationships, but they can’t explain why so many college students and professors suddenly began to express more fear, and engage in more self-censorship, around 2015. These mostly left-leaning people weren’t worried about the “other side”; they were afraid of a small number of students who were further to the left, and who enthusiastically hunted for verbal transgressions and used social media to publicly shame offenders.

A few years later, that same fearful dynamic spread to newsrooms , companies , nonprofit organizations , and many other parts of society . The culture war had been running for two or three decades by then, but it changed in the mid-2010s when ordinary people with little to no public profile suddenly became the targets of social-media mobs. Consider the famous 2013 case of Justine Sacco , who tweeted an insensitive joke about her trip to South Africa just before boarding her flight in London and became an international villain by the time she landed in Cape Town. She was fired the next day. Or consider the the far right’s penchant for using social media to publicize the names and photographs of largely unknown local election officials, health officials, and school-board members who refuse to bow to political pressure, and who are then subjected to waves of vitriol, including threats of violence to themselves and their children, simply for doing their jobs. These phenomena, now common to the culture, could not have happened before the advent of hyper-viral social media in 2009.

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

What Can We Do to Make Things Better?

My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” Beyond a reasonable doubt is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the preponderance of evidence. Is social media probably damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our collaborative-review document , or probably not ? I urge readers to examine the document themselves. I also urge the social-science community to find quicker ways to study potential threats such as social media, where platforms and their effects change rapidly. Our motto should be “Move fast and test things.” Collaborative-review documents are one way to speed up the process by which scholars find and respond to one another’s work.

Beyond these structural solutions, I considered adding a short section to the article on what each of us can do as individuals, but it sounded a bit too preachy, so I cut it. I now regret that decision. I should have noted that all of us, as individuals, can be part of the solution by choosing to act with courage, moderation, and compassion. It takes a great deal of resolve to speak publicly or stand your ground when a barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments is coming at you and nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).

Read: How to fix Twitter—and all of social media

Fortunately, social media does not usually reflect real life, something that more people are beginning to understand. A few years ago, I heard an insight from an older business executive. He noted that before social media, if he received a dozen angry letters or emails from customers, they spurred him to action because he assumed that there must be a thousand other disgruntled customers who didn’t bother to write. But now, if a thousand people like an angry tweet or Facebook post about his company, he assumes that there must be a dozen people who are really upset.

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age.

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.

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How does social media affect relationships?

Social media can affect all types of relationships in both positive and negative ways. It can help people stay connected, but may also lead to less quality in-person time.

People can use social media to stay connected to long-distance friends and family members or improve communication with their partners, children, and healthcare professionals.

In contrast, social media use can lead to less quality in-person time spent with loved ones and relationship dissatisfaction. These drawbacks may be related to pre-existing relationship issues or psychological conditions.

This article examines three positive and negative ways social media can affect relationships.

Positive effects of social media on relationships

Social media can affect relationships in the following positive ways.

1. Helps boost connectivity

According to recent research , social media use has a positive impact on social connection if people use it actively.

Family members and friends do not always live in the same city, or even the same state or country. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are quick and convenient ways for long-distance loved ones to stay in touch.

People can post updates about themselves and others in their lives, such as spouses and children, as well as share photos of vacations and other important family events. Additionally, people can tweak their privacy levels and share more personal information or pictures through individual or group messages.

These and other social media apps provide ways for people to video chat in real-time, further helping them feel more connected.

2. Helps improve communication

Margaret E. Morris, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and author of Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus , conducted a 2020 review of how people in various types of relationships use technology. Morris found that it is not the specific type of technology people use but how they use it that can bring value to the partnership.

Morris discusses the benefits of various types of technology. One example is a parent sharing a self-help app with a child to work through an argument. In discussing romantic relationships, Morris highlights how sharing images via social media can also feel like an extra way to communicate. Using tools such as WhatsApp, and texting through an argument, may also help some people communicate through writing. This allows a person time and space to formulate the right words when face-to-face conversations prove difficult.

3. Aids sexual gratification

Concerning romantic relationships, social media might actually help partners achieve sexual gratification. More specifically, this refers to pornography consumption on social media.

During a 2019 study involving 379 participants, researchers found pornography consumption may significantly help a person’s sexual gratification in their romantic relationships. However, the degree to which participants felt this improvement was dependent on the person’s sexual confidence and sexual compulsivity.

Learn more about the benefits and risks of pornography usage here.

Negative effects of social media on relationships

The following are some negative ways in which social media can impact relationships.

1. Fuels functional impairments

Substituting social media interactions for face-to-face communication may impact not only existing relationships but also the ability to form new relationships.

For example, while some researchers note the necessity for more research on social anxiety and social media use, it is possible for people with social anxiety to experience continued functional impairments — e.g., being uncomfortable or unable to form and engage in face-to-face relationships — when they replace in-person interactions with social media use.

Furthermore, failing to make or maintain in-person relationships may also appear as a consequence of social media use.

During a 2021 study at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, researchers found that more than half (59%) of the 300 participants reported prolonged use of social media had impacted their social interactions, negatively affecting family relationships and friendships while also making face-to-face communication more difficult. However, the study consisted only of students who identified as female aged 17–29 years, so more research is necessary.

2. Decreases quality time and relationship satisfaction

Excessive social media use can negatively impact quality time, create conflict, and reduce relationship satisfaction — whether the relationship is romantic or not.

During a 2021 study , researchers used Instagram and the app’s time-tracking capability to learn more about the connection between social media and relationship satisfaction.

They found an increase in Instagram usage led to a decrease in relationship satisfaction and an increase in conflict and negative outcomes. Furthermore, the dissatisfaction, conflict, and negative outcomes triggered an addictive use of Instagram.

On the flipside, making daily sacrifices for the relationship partner had a positive effect on relationship satisfaction and decreased the likelihood of conflict and negative outcomes.

However, there is also the issue of phubbing — the act of snubbing a person in a social setting by focusing on one’s smartphone. For example, if two people sit down for a face-to-face conversation and one continues to scroll social media apps and check notifications, that person is phubbing the other.

Numerous studies and research materials show that many people feel phubbing is rude and goes against social norms. Phubbees, or people who have experienced phubbing, report a reduced sense of emotional connection, empathetic concern, and interpersonal trust.

Additionally, phubbing may lead to heightened jealousy between romantic partners, as well as weaken their bond and lower their satisfaction with the relationship.

3. Provides an avenue for infidelity-related behaviors

“Infidelity-related behaviors,” such as communicating with alternative partners, can lead to relationship dissatisfaction, breakups, and divorce. Social media provides such an avenue for those behaviors.

While there is not much empirical evidence regarding social media infidelity-related behaviors (SMIRB) and marital relationships, there is growing research on the topic.

For example, researchers conducted a 2017 survey of 338 married or cohabiting partners on SMIRB. In addition to existing materials such as the Quality of Marriage Index and Experiences in Close Relationship Scale-Short Form, participants completed a survey specific to this study. Question topics revolved around online activities, emotions, and secrecy.

A small percentage of people reported participating in social media infidelity-related behaviors. However, researchers found that more participation in these behaviors was significantly related to lower relationship satisfaction, higher relationship ambivalence, and other relationship concerns.

How to manage social media use around relationships

Regardless of the relationship type, ideas for managing social media use around relationships include:

• putting away their smartphones while spending time together
• planning activities that do not leave space or time for scrolling
• leaving their phones outside the bedroom
• avoiding reaching out to old romantic relationships

Tips for general social media management

Ways to manage social media usage during everyday life include:

• moving social media apps away from the home screen or into folders
• turning off social media notifications
• installing internet browser extensions that limit or block social media access on computers
• setting time limits for using social media apps on smartphones — for example, through iPhone’s built-in Screen Time feature or Android’s built Digital Wellbeing
• committing to a social media detox

Risks and dangers of social media 

Additionally, social media may bring risks unrelated to relationships.

For example, social media use — including problematic social media use — may:

• have associations with mental health concerns such as depression , anxiety , and low self-esteem — although some studies have limitations
• spread misinformation about health issues
• exacerbate existing dangerous behaviors, for example, the possible link between social media and heavy alcohol consumption
• lead to less physical activity and poor sleep patterns
• decrease productivity at home, school, and work

Learn more about social media and mental health here.

Social media can have both positive and negative effects on interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.

While the advantages of social media and relationships tend to occur naturally, the disadvantages seem to be associated with existing relationship problems or underlying psychological concerns.

It is important for people to manage social media usage, as too much time spent on social media can negatively impact numerous aspects of life.

Last medically reviewed on April 28, 2022

• Mental Health
• Public Health

How we reviewed this article:

• Al-Saggaf, Y., et al. (2019). Phubbing: Perceptions, reasons behind, predictors, and impacts. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/hbe2.137
• Arikewuyo, A., et al. (2019). Erotic use of social media pornography in gratifying romantic relationship desires. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/erotic-use-of-social-media-pornography-in-gratifying-romantic-relationship-desires/793801AA23E2140F6DBFA8983BEC2616
• Bouffard, S., et al. (2021). Social media and romantic relationship: Excessive social media use leads to relationship conflicts, negative outcomes, and addiction via mediated pathways. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08944393211013566
• Erliksson, O. J., et al . (2020). Measuring associations between social anxiety and use of different types of social media using the Swedish Social Anxiety Scale for Social Media Users: A psychometric evaluation and cross-sectional study. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjop.12673
• Kolhar, M., et al. (2021). Effect of social media use on learning, social interactions, and sleep duration among university students. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319562X21000103#
• McDaniel, B. T., et al . (2017). Do you have anything to hide? Infidelity-related behaviors on social media sites and marital satisfaction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5400109
• Morris, M. E. (2020). Enhancing relationships through technology: Directions in parenting, caregiving, romantic partnerships, and clinical practice. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366940
• O’Day, E. B., et al. (2021). Social media use, social anxiety, and loneliness: A systematic review. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349872094_Social_media_use_social_anxiety_and_loneliness_A_systematic_review
• Research explores relationship between social media and drinking [Press release]. (2017). https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/678574
• Roberts, J. A., et al. (2022). On the outside looking in: Social media intensity, social connection, and user well-being: The moderating role of passive social media use. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-36716-001

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