The ugly truth about social media

Today, 9 out of 10 teens use or have used some sort of social media. Social media sites like Instagram and Snapchat are gaining popularity among teenagers, which increases the time of them using it. The increased amount of communication on social media is causing face to face and real life communications to decrease. Social media is negatively affecting our language and communication skills through the lack of use of grammar and having less real life communication. Social media has caused people to use incorrect grammar, which causes them to have trouble with writing. This can cause problems with how students write for school assignments because they are so used to using incorrect grammar.

When people communicate over social media, they use lots of abbreviations and rarely any punctuation. It seems weird or awkward if people use correct punctuation because so few people use it. Now days, if a person uses a period at the end of a sentence, people might assume that they are angry. “…written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause…; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive,” said Ben Crair. David Abulafia, a professor at Cambridge University, said that he is “ worried that students entering college do not know how to write…” Teenagers now use abbreviations for most of the words they use, which affects the way they write because they use too many abbreviations and no punctuation. For example, whenever I text one of my friends, I would use many abbreviations and no punctuation.

When I try to ask if we had any homework, I would just type “ did we have hw”. Many people using social media are negatively affected through their writing skills because their writing lacks grammar and this causes them to not meet the standards for writing. Social media has caused people to have less face to face communications and more communications over social media. According to Sherry Turkle, people would like to learn how to have a real conversation. Since people are used to having conversations on social media, they feel uncomfortable and uneasy having conversations with people face to face during real time.

When people text, they can present themselves the way that they want to other people by having lots of time to think about what they can say. But, when they have conversations in the real world, they might feel unprepared for what they are going to say. According to Sherry Turkle, social media lets us present ourselves the way that we want because we can edit, delete, and revise what we type over social media. When people use social media to communicate, there can be lots of misunderstandings because the words do not convey a tone. Since people are uncomfortable with having face to face conversations, this causes people to lack in communicating skills.

Although some may say that social media is a faster and easier way of communication, it is negatively affecting communication and writing skills because less people are willing to use correct grammar and have real time conversations due to them not being used to it. As more people communicate over social media, people talk to each other face to face less and use incorrect language to say what they want. Social media is causing less people to use correct grammar and no abbreviations, which is an important part of writing. More people prefer to have conversations on social media, which causes them to have less time talking to people in real life. People should now put their phones down and start having more conversations with people face to face before they forget how to have a real conversation.