Social Media and Social Bonds Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 2

Social Media and Social Bonds - Essay Example Shawn Ghuman in his essay â€Å"Is Technology Destroying Social Bonds?† notes how social media has led to the reduction of inter-person interaction in a real way. The argument is against the decline of what the author perceives as real relationships and conversations. For instance, he says, While chatting with friends, reading statuses, and skimming tweets, I wonder what happened to traditional communication in the current tech-savvy era. Our lives seemingly revolve around receiving digital messages, as we spend countless hours staring at screens and communicating with people online even though they are geographically close (110). While the author does have a point in the case of certain sections of people who may have had problems communicating even before the advent of social media, in the case of others, their extroversion may have merely transposed itself onto a virtual space. In many instances, plans for real interactions may even materialize on social media before they h appen in a real space. Thus, social media, while it is a virtual reality, may even in its nascent stages, facilitate rather than debilitate real interactions. The author also speaks of the relevance of social media in improving social bonds, albeit in a few lines. ... This was orchestrated through messages and short texts in order to escape the mechanism of surveillance. Through the course of the essay, the author reiterates at numerous points that contrary to the popular notion that social networking and modern technology have widened the scope of human communication, there is ample reason to believe the reverse. He uses persuasive reasoning by posing certain rhetorical questions to the readers urging them to reassess the role of technology in their lives. The most significant of these is the one where the reader is asked to think of instances where he/she may have connected with a person on Facebook or other similar social networking websites but upon meeting the individual in per son may be discovered that they are in fact incompatible. This stems from the larger point of social media allowing individuals to create virtual personalities for themselves which may not be reflective of who they truly are. Consequently, their social lives become limited largely confined to the virtual world as factors such as social awkwardness and introversion which may otherwise inhibit a person’s socialization are absent here. The writer also problematizes the idea that technology has simplified our lives. The argument here is that this seeming pursuit for simplicity and comfort may have actually resulted in oversimplification and sloth. This is seen in the lines â€Å"We can make ourselves sound intelligent, meaningful, or witty. Cellphones have become the faces of their users, and messages have become direct reflections of our personalities.†Ã‚