Social Media: An Excellent Tool of Communication that Students Use and Abuse
By Jayden Valencia
Staff Writer
Published October 17, 2018
In this day and age, social media is an excellent tool to have to keep in touch with friends and to stay up to date with individual interests.
The whole concept of social media is great; being able to connect to relatives, friends, and just anybody around the world almost instantly while also keeping up with not only local news, but worldwide news is incredible. The way people use it, however, is wrong with social media.
“It’s not the technology that’s good or bad. It’s the way people are using it and the social conventions we’ve learned.” Said communication studies professor, Carl Neffenger. We always hear how social media is wrong, or how it is ruining society and taking over people’s lives. The prevailing narrative is that social media is destroying the ability to communicate with people, but social media itself is not bad.
Social media has been around for a long time. Neffenger provided an example about the ancient Romans and how they would leave messages for each other in the bath houses, and with the Victorian Internet, people would send Morse code messages to each other through cable telegrams. These were forms of communication, and that is essentially all that social media is, communication.
Every generation thinks that the generation following them is dealing with social media incorrectly. In the 50’s, when every house had a telephone, you would hear that all the kids were going to get fat and ugly, sitting around all day doing nothing but talking on the phone. Now, the present equivalent of talking on the phone in the 50’s is texting. Previous generations claim that since texting has become the more popular medium of socializing, our kids are not going to learn how to talk and communicate in person. What previous generations misunderstand, however, is that it’s just another form for individuals to communicate; a form that they have not yet adapted to.
Emoji’s are good examples of a change in communication. Instead of text abbreviations, people are sending emojis to each other that symbolize a meaning or an emotion like, the angry face, smiley face and or sad face. Gifs are also used quite often, mostly as a reaction. This is just another different form of communication.
As was mentioned earlier, social media is a great tool, but often used poorly. There are some who get addicted to it and let it control their life. Again, that comes down to not knowing how to use social media properly. This is especially a problem for children whose parents buy them a phone at a young age and let them run free with it, not knowing how to use it properly.
Another problem with social media is while it is great that everyone has a voice on social media, it has also opened a whole new world for trolls. Trolls are people who post deliberately provocative messages to a newsgroup or message board.
This gives rise to a substantial amount of toxicity occurring on social media. Individuals use social media platforms to slander others without reason and to find entertainment at the expense of others; increasing the problem of toxicity on social media.
Once again, none of this is the fault of social media or the systems it promotes. It is us who abuse and exploit it.
