Technology has become very advanced and very important to our society. One thing that has become very big because of our technology is social networking. There are many positives to having easy access to social media, but there are also negative effects as well. The impact of all this social media has overall a negative effect of our daily lives in society. In “ru online? ‘: The Evolving Lexicon of Wired Teens”, by Kris Axtman, Kris talks about how instant messaging has affected the communication of the younger people in our generation.
In “Note To Selfie”, by John Dickerson, he writes about how people are pausing their lives to post about their happenings on social media. These two authors discuss some negative aspects to having social media surround our lives. One negative aspect that I see social media effects is our language. Language is one the most important creations in our world. It is how we communicate with others and express ourselves. For teenagers, they have begun to take our English language and create many different terms and slangs so they can talk faster.
Now, yes this is positive if you are lazy and want to make things easy, but what about the long term effects? The more you do something, the more likely it is to become a habit in your life. It only takes 21 days to start a habit, so it seems like it would be pretty easy for people to get a habit of this form of communication. All teenagers are now of days writing things in different slangs and term, so to them it becomes natural, and sooner or later it will start to affect them in school and in their essays.
Axtman states, “A negative, though, is that their grammar is becoming atrocious, and Net lingo is starting to show up on school assignments“ (248). All of these grammatical errors, like no punctuations, run on sentences and slang words, are being transferred from their instant messaging to their actual writing. There are some students who know when to use which kind of writing, especially in the older generations because this social media didn’t become popular until later in their life.
But what about the kids who are 7 or 8 and are living their childhood around this technology, they are learning this different form of communication at a younger age so it will have a bigger effect on their writing. This begins to affect our society because the teachers now have to struggle with this issue in their students, and messaging and social media are only growing bigger and bigger, so it is not likely that it will get easier. Besides social media affecting our language, it also affects our capability of living in the moment.
In our society, people like to use social media to post about most of the events that are happening in their life. People are so quick to share these events that they post about it while the event is still taking place. Not focusing on what is right in front of you makes you miss some important moments because you are engaged on your phone rather than engaged in the moment. Sometimes it is understandable, like if something happens and it was funny, so you write about it so you don’t forget.
But it also depends where exactly you are at. If you are sitting in a car while driving to the store, it doesn’t have that much of an effect on missing the moment because it isn’t really that exciting. However, if you are at a big event, like a concert, for example, you definitely don’t want to pause to post a tweet because while you are writing what happened two minutes ago in the past, you aren’t seeing what is right in front of you in the present. Not only posting about it, but recording it as well.
I have been to many concerts in my life, and sometimes as I look around I see people with their phones up recording the entire thing, and instead of looking at the performer, they are staring at their phone to make sure their angle is good. How is that any better than watching other people’s concert videos online? Sure, you got it on camera so you have it forever, but you are so worried about your phone that you didn’t even get to focus on the real experience of having the performer right there in front of you with other fans surrounding you and screaming in excitement.
What you see and hear with your own senses is a much better memory than one you wrote down or recorded. Not only does your phone ruin your experience, but it also ruins it for the people around you because when you have it up recording it could be blocking their view and distracting them. Dickerson expressed how, “Sherry Turkle wrote about putting our lives ‘on pause’ in order to tweet, text, or take a selfie: When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking'” (255). Social media has this negative effect on consuming people’s time.
When I took my journalism class last semester, I learned that the average person spends about 4-6 hours on their phone every day. We know that texting does not necessarily take up that much time in one day, so we assume that a lot of that time is spent on social media and the internet, when you could easily be doing something more productive with your day. When people need to get things done is usually when they tend to go on social media the most because it is how they choose to procrastinate. With the younger generation, social media is definitely something for students to do instead of doing their school assignments.
It isn’t just something that people do as a distraction though, social media has become a habit for people. They go on it at the dinner table or when hanging out with friends and many other occasions where they should be off of it and enjoying the moment. Or they go on it while they are driving, which is obviously not the responsible time for it. But it is growing so rapidly and people are becoming addicted. People lose the fascination they had of the world around them when they were little and spend their passing time on their electronic devices.
If we practice hard enough, we can become thoroughly interested in even the simplest things of daily life, the way a child would. The smallest things would become so meaningful… ” (258, Dickerson). Sitting on your phone in the car and scrolling down your twitter feed could make you miss something as simple as a beautiful sunset. Technology over the past years has become so advanced that it makes things like social media so easy to access. Social media has become a worldwide phenomenon so fast because of our advanced technology.
These advancements are a great thing and have many positive effects, but with things like social media, it comes with negative effects as well. In the two articles “r u online? ‘: The Evolving Lexicon of Wired Teens”, by Kris Axtman and “Note To Selfie”, by John Dickerson, the two authors express their views on instant messaging and social media and some of the negative effects they have on our society. In my opinion, two of the most negative effects involved with having social media involved with our daily lives is the adaptation of language and people not living in the moment.
