preview

Social Medi Enhancing Connections

Better Essays

Social Media: Enhancing Connections One Post at a Time Heavy breathing. Thudding heart. Sweaty Palms. It is painful, yet every individual deals with the agonizing emotion: fear. Some of the most common phobias include fear of tight spaces, failure, public speaking, and death. However, one of man’s deepest fears is the thought of living alone, isolated, and terribly, painfully lonely. Despite the prevalence of this fear, there is little room for it in today’s culture. The average person interacts with dozens of people daily. Furthermore, with the dawn of this digitally engaged generation, the number of daily interactions has grown steadily through online social networking. Moreover, social media enhances these connections and makes them …show more content…

Barry Wellman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who has analyzed social networks since the 1960s, says that today’s society believes the illusion that people spend their days interacting with a group of friends, engaging in community every day. This is not the case. The majority of people spend their free time sitting at home, alone, watching television (Jayson). Therefore, using social media actually brings the community closer together because people genuinely interact on these sites, as opposed to sitting at home watching television with no outside interaction. In fact, the writer from the Time magazine should be grateful that she even heard about her friend’s personal change, because if she and her so called friend were not close enough to call each other or meet face to face, the writer may have never heard about this change at all. This supports the evidence that social media does not break our community apart by limiting social interaction, but rather draws society closer together by providing a community centered activity where individuals can communicate. Social media also builds community by allowing many individuals have drawn together to gain support from like minded groups that are not found offline. For example, an article from the Journal of School Health states that

Get Access