How Social Media Affect the Way We Communicate
The new generation, as we previously said, had now a completely different way to communicate and socialise. We share everything on our profiles, but how did social media exactly affect and change the way we all interact with each other?
Today, being friends with someone is incredibly easy via the internet. We go on a forum, on Tumblr, on a blog, and we find a bunch of people who have the same interests as us. It might be music, food, tv shows, comics and many other hobbies, we all find a way to communicate and talk about what we like the most.
Thanks to many apps today, we can find someone we crossed our paths with and we could easily add them on Facebook and start chatting out of nowhere, starting a new friendship or even a new relationship.
How do we communicate on social media?
Just by using some hashtags on Instagram or Twitter, we can find somebody else who might be interested in our pictures and opinions. If they agree, we just have to start talking through direct messages and chats, giving us every possible way to communicate with someone who might happen to live on the other side of the planet.
Sharing the same interests with someone that lives far away from us, might be the perfect excuse to start travelling, practising a new language or maybe even starting to learn something new.
From Tinder to Snapchat, many people meet for the first time on social media. Some of them might just be too shy to talk to us in public and social media are the perfect way to contact someone and let them know how interested we are.
1 in 3 teenagers today meet an online friend in real life. Friendships and relationships in the digital age are now a lot easier than they were when the internet did not exist when people had to write letters and wait for a whole month before they got one in return. Today, more than 55% of friendships start online and can become incredibly important.
We also know the growing popularity of online dating, with several apps and websites where you can describe yourself and hopefully meet your soulmate. The biggest hope for anybody who meets someone on social media platforms, however, is that the person that we get to know is real and not some catfish or someone that is lying to us about their lives.
Even though this problem is affecting many relationships, as we can obviously understand by the popularity of tv reality shows such as MTV’s Catfish, we also know that teenagers usually surf the internet looking for validation and friends who have something in common. It’s in human nature to search for somebody who will be able to understand us and what we go through every day, that’s why we can say that the internet changed the way we live and communicate with others.
Many times it’s just easier to hide behind a screen and pretend to be stronger and cooler than we actually are. Sometimes it’s just really nice to share our passions with someone and some other times we just need a fresh start with someone that doesn’t know us in real life, but that we cannot approach in said life.
In any case, the internet will keep changing lives and the ways we relate to other people, making us think that it’s normal to text someone we never met before and think that it’s so easy to talk to them that we might as well have been friends for years. Hiding behind a screen isn’t always negative, sometimes it gives us the elf-confidence that we need to get out of our shells and be ourselves. We can look for support, become friends, share moments and be who we always wanted to be.
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by Giulia Valenti (Intern)
