Social media debate and contemporary discourse

Social media definitely changes the way that we interact with each other. Much of our communication today is digital, rather than face-to-face. There are positives in that we are able to keep in touch with people all over the world, but there are negatives as well when people become withdrawn from society and focused on their digital devices. Marketers have studied this issue a lot, trying to understand whether social media ties are weaker or stronger than real world ones, for example (Gilbert & Karahalios, 2010).

One of the key sociocultural aspects is with respect to how social media changes our circles of friends. Jones (2013) notes that face-to-face communications may diminish, but total human interactions might not. Having added social interactions can ultimately be a positive impact of social media, despite the risk posed to face-to-face interactions, which may diminish.

There are two forms of evidence that can be used to support my position that social media has an overall positive effect on human interaction. The first is from academic studies, several of which have been done. Many fields have taken a look at how social media is affecting us -- marketing, nursing, sociology, psychology -- and research from all of these different fields can inform the study. The other way to look at this is through observation and to conduct my own research on the subject. This will provide both anecdotal evidence and further survey evidence to bolster the findings of the academic research.

4. A quick search of a website dedicated to debating this issue shows that there are several key arguments hat people use to make the claim that social media has a negative effect on human interaction. The first is that it reduces the need for face-to-face communication, and indeed in some cases make face-to-face communications awkward. This argument is interesting because it ignores the possibility that replacing face-to-face interactions with virtual ones is somehow negative -- this is assumed but never really supported in this argument. A further counterargument is that people can be spread too thin, in that they have more "friends" with whom they interact. A visit to one's hometown, for example, can bring about a lot of interactions, more than before, so that the closest people do not spend enough time together as the visiting person is now spread too thin (Debate.org, 20140.

5.

My opponents are incorrect for a couple of reasons. The first is that they are ignoring that virtual interactions are substitutes for face-to-face, but not necessarily negative substitutes. There is an assumption embedded in their arguments that virtual relationships are weaker or less effective, but this is not necessarily the case. The second thing is that people still have face-to-face interactions, and these can still be quite powerful. Just because we were able to phone our grandmothers as children doesn't mean we didn't have friends -- it's the same now with virtual communications.