Lab+4

Lab 4: Social Media

I think the point that Sherry Turkle is trying to make is that our lives should not revolve around the technology we use and that we should use our technology as tools to enhance our life. We live in a wired world, where everyone is connected to each other through smart phones and the internet. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter, we can share our most current thoughts and activates with all of our “friends.” I put “friends” in quotation marks because many of the people we are connected to on these sites might not actually be friends, but rather acquaintances, or even strangers. Because of these types of sites and our constant connection to other people, we feel as though we need constant attention from these people. We feel that we must keep our friends and acquaintances updated about our lives and we expect some sort of response from them, such as a replying comment, a thumbs-up, or a twitter mention. I think this creates a false sense of human interaction between people because they are only communicating via text and that is not real interaction. I mean that it is okay to communicate with people through social media sites as long as you still meet them face to face sometimes, but if you only communicate with them through Facebook (which I do with many people) then it is not really a deep conversation.

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, people can now access these social media sites from anywhere and are truly connected with their “friends” all the time. I think this is a bigger problem for the younger generation of kids which are 15 or younger. This is because they might substitute real-life relationships with online relationships. These kids may develop poor communication skills because they don’t have as much contact with people in real life as they should. We could be creating a whole generation of poor conversationalists. We need to teach these kids, and remember ourselves, that this technology is meant to enhance our communication with people in times when we want to communicate when we aren’t together. It is not meant to replace it. This means we need to limit our (and our children’s) time on social media websites and spend more time interacting with real people. I also think that some people need to set aside some time in the day where they just keep their phones turned off, because some people really do spend too much time on their phones.