Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Texting and Social Media Ruining our Social Skills?

  
A pretty good number of people think that social media and texting is slowly eating away at society's social skills. Am I one of those people?  Yes, but I'm not as firmly rooted in that belief as some others might be.  Some people are likely to be less involved in actual one on one conversations than others, and whether or not that's thanks to technology is up for debate.

Here are a few reasons why I think technology being used for communication more often than not is a bad thing.

1. Some people are too concerned about their social media lives. A negative outcome of this might be someone convincing themselves that their social media status defines their worth in the real world. Obviously, that's not the case, but people like cyberbullies prey on those who have this belief  in order to give themselves an easier time of victimizing someone.

2. Someone who texts more often than actually speaking might become lazy when it comes to real conversation. A negative effect of this might be someone using slang words from their texting experiences, which isn't always appropriate. An example of this would be someone saying "omg" instead of actually taking the short few seconds to say "oh my gosh." Or saying "lol" instead of actually laughing. (I'm not kidding, I actually saw that happen between a group of teenagers in a hospital waiting room.)

3. Speaking of teenagers, one of the things my generation seems to love doing is making a big deal about everything. During text messaging, that is, which brings me to my final point. Some people tend to over exaggerate their reactions to things during text messaging.
For example, someone saying "that is literarlly the worst thing to happen to anyone ever", upon receiving news via text messaging or social media that someone had simply hit their toe on a table.

I could go on, but I think three simple reasons are enough for now. Especially considering that I've witnessed situations that were either similar to, or exactly like the ones above. Do I think it's too late for society to unplug from their phones and computers in favor of actually experiencing the real world? Certainly not, but that doesn't mean there isn't a time limit for us to do so.

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Friday, October 10, 2014

How I Think Internet Safety Should be Handled

Internet privacy issues are something I think people should take more seriously, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has this opinion. In fact, I'm quite positive. I read an article about a fifteen-year-old girl in the UK who would agree with me, because she had a personal picture of herself in a bikini shown to an entire class for an Internet safety lesson. Ironic, right? See, this would have been fine if she had consented to the picture being used, but she didn't. Of course she didn't, and I wouldn't want a picture of me halfway undressed being shown to a bunch of strangers either. This brings me to my first concern about privacy on the web.

First of all, I think people should have better sense than to display personal images of other people to large groups, or to anyone. They could get sued, thrown in jail, attacked, the list goes on. One of the best, and probably the simplest solution to Internet privacy problems is for people to have respect for other's personal information. That way, it might not be as dangerous to share these types of things. 

A second solution would be for Facebook and other social networking websites to improve their privacy settings. This has been an issue for Facebook ever since they launched their website. Time after time I've seen headlines about Facebook "fixing" their privacy settings because users were complaining about how loose they were. Facebook isn't the only website with this problem, of course. There are plenty of other websites that aren't social networks, but have their fair share security problems anyway.

Obviously, it's not always entirely the websites fault. A third solution would be for users to make themselves more aware of and actually use the privacy settings on these types of websites. Notice I said it's not always the websites fault. The predators in situations like these are always the real menace. However, people could make themselves a lot less vulnerable to these online predators if they would just educate themselves on how to stay safe on the web.

I'm not going to say that people shouldn't post personal content on the Internet. Even though it's the wise thing to not do, people shouldn't have to be afraid to post even the smallest things about themselves online. It's their right to post whatever they want to, personal or otherwise. However, it's also someone else's right to do whatever they want with that information. This is a conflict that can be resolved by improvement of knowledge on both sides of the fence.

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