Social Networking: Its Effect on Communication

Facebook, Twitter and the plethora of other social networking websites have changed the way people communicate with each other. That is an indisputable fact. Personal communication used to be about one-on-one interaction—whether it’d be in person or over the phone. Even group reunions used to be about one-on-one. If you had a story to tell you would have a specific audience who was listening to you; you were aware of who they were. Facebook changed that. Now personal communication involves photos, statuses, and likes and very little one-on-one. When a photo is posted it is shown to all your friends, and depending on your privacy settings, to even more people. Therefore, your story was transmitted to a large group of people, most of who know very little about the context of the photo. After all, these images and words put up there are what we consciously choose as what we want people to see. As discussed in visual rhetoric, a photo is only but an instant, a very limited snapshot, of everything else in the real world image. The question remains: is this change good or bad?

That is still an unanswered question and one that may remain unanswered for many years, since the effects of this changes vary from person to person. However, as Stephen Marche writes in an Atlantic Monthly article that Facebook is just a result of how we use it. As a society, he points out, we seek independence which with the use of technology, and specifically Facebook, we end up isolating ourselves. We are constantly preoccupied with what we put up, what we say, how we say it, how many likes we get and Marche says, “Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect”(Marche, 2012).

On the other hand, Facebook is a tool that allows everyone to stay in touch, easily and quickly. Before social media, there was no mass personal information sharing, other than sending a mass email. Many argue that Facebook allows for bonds to stay strong and friends and family to stay in contact. This point is valid since before Facebook if someone wanted to know about another person they had to actively seek information. Facebook presents it to you in the “news feed,” just as a newspaper presents its news. Going by the concept of technology is what we make of it, Facebook allows you to stay close with people you are already close with, outside of the digital world, and does nothing to the relationships that have no real outside foundation.