Ramirez 1

Running Head: Communication

Social Media Affecting Communication

Deni Ramirez

The University of Texas at El Paso

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Communication

Abstract

Social media has so many advantages in which it can be used but people have been

using it in a harmful way and it has been affecting peoples health and communication. The

problem with social media is that when used excessively or in an incorrect way it can have

a bad effect on people. It changes ways in which people communicate with each other and

the way people think and behave. Research has been done on the effects of social media on

peoples communication and the results explain the reasons and how social media is

affecting people. Results have shown that social media is making people anti-social and

that it can cause illness to people. To stop this from happening people might have to stop

using social media to communicate, set the phone to the side and start talking to each other.
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Communication

Introduction

There are basic human needs which are food, water, air and now added to the basic

needs is social media or internet. We are now depending on the internet for us to use social

media, it has become a need because we enter a house and the first thing we do is ask for

the internets password. Social media has become an addiction for us, it can be just like a

drug which can consume our time and our social life. As Allison Graham says in her

speech, a research was done on 2001 where people said they had 10 close friends and the

same research was done in 2014 where people said they had 2. What caused the decrees in

the number of friends that people have? There is one thing that has influenced people and is

social media.

The decrees on friends is not the only way in which social media has affected

people, there are disorders related to internet use too that affects communication. This

disorder is called Internet Use Disorder and was proven by the collaboration of different

people in the research Problematic Social Media Use. In this research Bnyai, F., Zsila,

., Kirly, O., Maraz, A., Elekes, Z., Griffiths, M. D., and Demetrovics, Z, show the

different problems that social media cause.

There are different ways in which social media is having a negative effect on

communication but first your need to understand how is pushing us further away from each

other? What is happening with people? How is technology dividing us? In what ways is

social media affecting communication? How can we change the effects of social media on

communication? You need to understand and be informed before you make a wise decision.
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Communication

Social media is disconnecting us

How is social media pushing us further away from each other? People think that

social media is a way to bring people closer because through social media, an example can

be Facebook, you can communicate with people that do not leave close to you. This is true

but there are things not seen by people as the simple situation in which people are together

in a room but instead of communicating with each other they are on their phones using

social media. Graham says in her speech that when a person is using their phone in front of

people that means that there is something more important on the phone than the people

around them. Social media has taken us to a point where we do not care about a

conversation with others, social media is affecting our communication, it is disconnecting

us.

Fig. 1: Visual example of the influence

social media has on people.

Our vocabulary is also changing, social media is also affecting our vocabulary and

we see it normal but we do not understand that is something affecting our communication

making ineffective. When people are texting it is easier to abbreviate word with the purpose

of not having to write long texts and not having to read long texts. When using

abbreviations people messages might be miss understood, loose meaning, or not provide the

point and this is a way in which people get disconnected and may not be talking about
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Communication

the same thing and this is what ineffective communication is. People may not see this or do

not think is important because it is just trough social media but it is. Social media is

something that is supposed to help people stay in touch with each other or know what other

are up to but the way people use it is affecting more than it is helping.

What is happening to people?

To use social media can be something pleasant, it might be something people likes

because they get relaxed and helps time to go by fast but social media can be like a drug,

you can get obsessed with it and even you might feel like you need it. Problematic social

media use can be determined by a range of addiction symptoms including: mood

modification (i.e., excessive social media use leading to specific changes in mood states),

salience (i.e., total preoccupation with social media use), tolerance (i.e., increasing amounts

of time using social media), withdrawal symptoms (i.e., negative feelings and

psychological symptoms such as irritability, anxiety when social media use is restricted),

conflict (i.e., interpersonal problems as a direct result of social media usage), and relapse

(i.e., returning to excessive social media use after a period of abstinence) say Fanni

Banyai1, Agnes Zsila1, Orsolya Kira, Aniko Maraz, Zsuzsanna Elekes, Mark D. Griffiths,

Cecilie Schou Andreassen, Zsolt Demetrovics in their paper. Their research also says that

negative outcomes triggered by the excessive use of social media may have a detrimental

effect on the personal, social, and/or professional lives of the users. These negative effects

affect peoples lives because nowadays people do not know when it is enough and this has a

negative outcome in their personal life. It is affecting their personal, social, and/or
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Communication

professional lives because of the lack of communication, people forget about the real world

and they get stocked in their social media world.

People are losing their ability to remember things by themselves nowadays people

need to be reminded by social media as Facebook to remember an important date. Christine

Rousselle in her article, wrote Social media might be causing us to forget the value of

memory. Whats the use of remembering someones birthday or anniversary or whatever if

Facebook is going to tell you anyway?. Also, people use social media to congratulate

someone or say happy birthday instead of calling that person and showing your

appreciation for that person. We are depending on social media to be our memory and this

is affecting our interpersonal communication.

The division

With social media people have the opportunity of watching what their friends and

family are doing thanks to their posts and as technology has advanced, now people can see

what you are doing in the moment you are doing it. The problem is the constant posting of

people, their necessity to tell the world what they are doing and even what they are eating.

As the graph demonstrates, 100 percent of people post something a day and 65 percent

Communication

post 6 or more times a day. People

are more concerned about posting

what they are doing than focusing

on doing it or with whom. One

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thing that is important now is how many friend or followers you have but you may really

talk to only a few. As Rousselle says in her article Friend has been transformed from

someone whom a person has a fulfilling relationship with into someone who lurks in the

background of life. People do not have as many close friends as they used to have because

what people value has changed. Friends do not have the same value, people value more the

number of friends they have on social media as Facebook than the friends they have in real

life.

The division between people can feel normal and people do not even notice it. There

are reasons why people are being divided and one of them is problematic social media use.

Problematic social media can be said to be a disease or an obsession because as any other

disease it can be detected with symptoms. Some of the symptoms that were already

mentioned are mood change, silence, and relapse (returning to the excessive use of social

media). These symptoms are causing a division between people because when a person has

problematic social media use he or she tends to be away from people, to be in his/her

phones and feel irritated when he/she is not able to use social media. This division is

affecting communication because people are not communication or interacting with others.

Another aspect of people and social media that is causing a division and affecting

interpersonal communication is people depending too much on social media. This goes in

hand with problematic social media use is not necessarily the same and as problematic but

they are similar. People are losing their ability to remember this, important events related to

their friend and this also might be for having too many Facebook friends. People

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depend on social media but one they are face to face with people without social media they

cannot remember someones birthday or friendship anniversary. This affects interpersonal

communication because people are not worrying to keep in touch with people and

remembering the important things.

Communication being affected

There are different ways in which people communicate with each other, there is

speaking, facial expressions, body movements, writing, drawing, eye contact, touching, and

using technology (social media). People have the opportunity to communicate through

technology and have access to social media which was supposed to make our

communication easier but instead it is affecting the way we communicate. As Maura Keller

cites in her paper There has been a shift in the way we communicate; rather than face-to-

face interaction, were tending to prefer mediated communication, Paul Booth says. Then

Keller says Wed rather e-mail than meet; wed rather text than talk on the phone. Being

face to face with someone involves the majority of the different ways of communication.

When you talk to someone in face to face you have to speak to that person but you also use

body movements, facial expressions, eye contact and touching to communicate with

someone. People prefer social media to avoid all these ways of communication or being

face to face with someone because sometimes can be difficult or embarrassing.

Susie East in her paper cites Sherman that says "Before if you were having a face to

face interaction everything is qualitative. You use someone's gestures or facial expressions,

that sort of thing, to see how effective your message is". When people are having a

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conversation face to face they can use the gestures and body movements to see if your

conversation is being effective or pleasant to the other person. In the other hand, when

people are having a conversation through social media it is not easy to know if the

conversation is pleasant to the other person or you do not know how the person is feeling.

Carson Reider asks an important question in his article which is with the shift from face-

to-face conversation, are we missing out on being in the moment or losing the ability to

sense how someone is really feeling as they relay a message?. Then he answers the

question saying that technology (social media) habits have led to a decline in

communication skills in this generations. As social media becomes more common among

people, communication skills are decaying. People do not communicate face to face and

with it, they are losing the ability to understand facial expressions, body movements, etc.

Language (vocabulary) is the main tool for communication and is also being

affected by social media. When using social media and typing messages, people tend to

shorten the message because no one wants to type a lot nor read a lot and vocabulary tends

to be changed. In the Oxford Dictionary it says the language we use to communicate with

each other tends to be more malleable than formal writing, the combination of informal,

personal communication and the mass audience afforded by social media is a recipe for

rapid change. Nowadays people tend to abbreviate words making the text short and this

might change the meaning of what people are trying to say. There is effective and

ineffective communication and while talking face to face or even typing every word you

want to say can be effective communication, abbreviations might not be. In Allison

Grahams speech she says that with shortening, we lose and run the risk of not being able

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to fully communicate and losing our vocabulary equals a potential loss of being able to

express ourselves. Not being able to communicate and express ourselves is a way in which

social media is affecting communication. With social media, messages are losing meaning

making us unable to communicate.

Conclusion

People depend on social media trough their day, they are constantly checking their

phones to see what is going on in it. Social media is affecting communication because

people is letting themselves be addicted to it. Interpersonal communication is being

affected due to several factors but the most important is that we are most of the time only

concentrated in media. Graham said, we need to look up and see who our neighbor is, we

need to put that phone away, make a human connection and teach human interaction.

People need to take their time to do things for themselves, to interact with others and do

other activities that are not to be with the phone on social media. Lets teach others not to

depend on social media, it is better lo live without being chained to something.

Communication
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References

Bnyai, F., Zsila, ., Kirly, O., Maraz, A., Elekes, Z., Griffiths, M. D., & ... Demetrovics,

Z. (2017). Problematic Social Media Use: Results from a Large-Scale Nationally

Representative Adolescent Sample. Plos ONE, 12(1), 1-13. doi:

10.1371/journal.pone.0169839

Company, I. G. (n.d.). Social Media and Interpersonal Communication. Retrieved March

15, 2017, from http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/051313p10.shtml

East, S. (n.d.). How does social media affect your brain. Retrieved March 15, 2017, from

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/social-media-brain/

How social media is changing language. (2015, December 22). Retrieved March 15, 2017,

from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/06/social-media-changing-language/

Reider, C. (n.d.). How Is Social Media Affecting Our Communication? Retrieved March

15, 2017, from https://www.nrmedia.biz/blog/how-is-social-media-affecting-our-

communication

Rousselle, C. (n.d.). Christine Rousselle - Social Media is Making Us Anti-Social.

Retrieved February 11, 2017, from

http://townhall.com/columnists/christinerousselle/2015/01/31/social-media-is-

making-us-antisocial-n1950924

T. (2014, November 10). Retrieved February 11, 2017, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5GecYjy9-Q