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Social Media And Its Effect On Society

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Introduction It is to no one’s surprise the exponential growth that social media has undergone in the past decade. Such growth has allowed people from all around the world interact with one another without having to worry about time or location. From important business meetings to casual gatherings, online media such as Facebook, Skype and e-mail have facilitated communication as high tech innovations have allowed a better and advanced way of creating and maintaining sociality. The effectiveness of such may be an important area of study since the common believe about face to face interactions and online communication is that there is a negative reciprocity. In other words, F2F communication diminishes because there is more availability to …show more content…

After all, communication is still detrimental. However, although the methodology is changing it is important to consider how the change is directly affecting the mean of communication. It is dire to ask questions such as: are social media benefitting relationships? How is communication being manipulated? Is this a good manipulation? How are impressions of individuals being formed, based on their social media involvement? And the question that this study has analyzed in respect to Facebook, one of the most used websites in the United States (Tong, Der Heide, Langwell, & Walther, 2008): how is personality – specifically extraversion - correlated with the number of Facebook Friends that a person may have. When posing this question it is important to understand the dynamic definition of “friend” when it comes to social media. For example, the number of Facebook friends may suggest that a person has x amount of online connections through that web page. However, it does not necessarily mean that that person holds day to day conversation with his “virtual” friends or that he even knows the people personally (Tong et al., 2008). Because the online definition of “friend” varies from real life to virtual life, it is hard to judge true connotations within personality, per se; nevertheless it is an important phenomenon that should continue to be studied.

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