Is Social Media Helpful or Harmful? (Opinion)
When it comes to communication through social media, the idea of it hurting or helping physical communications is not mutually exclusive. As a person who wants to be heavily involved in entertainment, I find social media to be a valuable tool for my dream job goals. However, misunderstanding someone’s intent through an online message has become quite common. Because of this, many divides online have surfaced into altering our own physical lives. But I think the online situation has evolved into how we operate. Projecting how we feel about others even during something as small as the mood someone is in reading a text.
Depending on where you want to take your life professionally, social media can be taken from a wider perspective than most other things. If you provide an independent service and need publicity, social media is an effective approach. If you are retired and just want to feed the pigeons in your backyard, social media is nothing but a want. The only reason I draw out these examples is because proper communication is entirely dependent on personal stakes.
As a twenty-two-year-old man, I have grown up with the culture. I know that connections will be one of the most important elements to climbing the ladder toward a career. And forming the right network on social media will legitimize myself in the eyes of important people. Through this reason alone, social media is helpful to those dependent on social connections. But after that, the relationship takes a turn in any direction. Because that is when it turns into one on one. Something I think is the most usual form of damaging media communication. Have you ever wondered why a lot of the rudest people on social platforms are old people? I mean really old people, over sixty-five typically. It is because they have already walked their walk. They are content with the life they live. Social media has been around for a fraction of their lives. They lose absolutely nothing when their speech warrants an ‘unfollow’ or an ‘unfriend’ but of course not all old people are mean on social media.
Growing up, I have learned the subtlety in how different a message can be interpreted. In this generation, I certainly am not alone in trying my best to provoke the right impression upon someone reading what I have written. As the younger generation we simply have gotten better at understanding the versatility some messages can hold. We were the guinea pigs, learning from trial and error. A lot can really change with the emotion one could apply while reading, typically correlating with our current moods. Which is also why not all young people are nice on social media.
Because of this, personal ideas of who we are will be the quickest conductor of how we interpret a message. This makes sense with how often we associate ourselves with what is going on online. That is why social media being helpful and harmful cannot be mutually exclusive. A lot of people like to blame miscommunication if an argument goes bad online. When truly it always starts with genuine thoughts and opinions of someone, no matter the surface level. There is nothing bad about social media, there are only bad moments and sometimes bad people. Social media is a smaller scale of what the world is and has always been. All it did was shine a light on it. How we choose to overcome problems depends on our own headspace. If someone is texting their boss and suddenly he is upset about something unclear, a healthy individual will go as far as meeting them in person to solve the problem. There is a spectrum for everything and social media is not the exception.
-Isaac William Joesph
