How Social Media Affects Personal Communication

As Facebook tries to remind you to wish your friend “Happy Birthday!” with a sidebar, you eventually get comfortable with screen to screen conversations. Surprisingly, people are not experiencing cultural shock with the transition from one-on-one talking to screen-to-screen chatting. They seem to enjoy it and follow the stream. As avid Internet users, people never realize that social media tools have actually changed the way they communicate. It has become a regular activity one must do to stay on trend.

The sense of interpersonal communication

You have been lacking real communication due to your busy activities and this is where social media plays its role. You can still interact with friends and family through the use of electronic devices. Social media becomes a new medium to connect each other privately and publicly. Some of you may find it more comfortable tweeting your best friend than texting or talking to her in person. However, you still feel that you are talking to her as in one-on-one conversation through your public account.

Loosing personal touch

Those emoticons and auto-texts are too cute to be left behind; you have an emoticon for “laugh out loud” or is it "Rolling of the floor"? (Seriously, you can't roll of the floor laughing for few times! You'll get head trauma!), or an ugly Domo auto-text for the people that makes you mad, and only your device knows how many others you have. However, an emoticon is a TEXTual portrayal. It’s lacking real emotion and sometimes, it’s misinterpreted.

As social media users, people are losing their personal touch because they can send 'a laugh' while putting a serious look and 'a cry' when they're actually happy. People almost forget how it feels to have a real conversation (or real rolling of the floor laughing!) in person because they enjoy typing their thoughts without the same expression they need to.

The heavily-edited version of you

Dr. Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the Pennsylvania University explained, “When you write something, you have the time to construct and refine what you say.” Hence, when you have an oral conversation, you don’t have time to think about the perfect thing to say. Her experiment shows that people say positive things when they are talking to a bigger audience. This result explains the perfectly flawless life that always shows up on social media.

It’s through interpersonal communication that you can show the real you. But the invention (or intervention) of social media affects the way you want the world to see you. You might feel that everyone looks better on social media; and that’s the real problem. Social media can make you feel an instant happiness and also, in the worst case scenario, a sudden loser.