Rhetoric of social media

Does anybody remember what life was like without Facebook? I am extremely embarrassed to say that I don’t.  This lifestyle of constantly knowing the happenings of people and getting instant updates of the news, the latest photos, and the newest controversy will now be a commonplace for kids growing up in this new century.  We’ve been hearing for years about the deconstruction of print media; world-renowned newspapers are failing, “snail-mail” is being replaced with texting, emails, and video-chatting. Newspapers are no longer revered as common news sources. Face-to-face conversations are no longer a commonality; why would you go out of your way to tell someone something important if you could send them an SMS message instantly? Why would you waste ink in a printer to print a photo if you could publish it to the web for everyone to see. People of all ages are wasting time, being unproductive online, rather than getting the necessary rest they need to function properly.  I recently saw Ariana Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, a prominent online news source for liberal news, speak and she brought up the problems in our lives that everyone deals with but no one solves.

Technology is moving at rapid speeds, faster than anyone would have thought it would move. Internet start-ups are the “dot com” boom of our generations. Teenagers like me who have versed themselves in computer code can create hundred’s, thousand’s, even millions of dollars by themselves by coding an application with the presence of a computer and a keyboard. Physical interaction has changed for the worse. Kids growing up in our generation cannot hold conversations. We have gotten so used to communicating via internet and text that when we actually speak we have nothing to say, it’s all been said online.

That said, all of these issues are only going to make our society and culture worse off in the future. Communication is a key to leadership and power. Our kids are the future and they need to be able to know how to effectively communicate. So how can we fix this issue? Speech classes and encouraging socialization would certainly help.

I do not want to seem like I am completely antagonistic towards technology. Honestly, I do not know what I would do without my phone, as terrible as that may sound. Nevertheless, things change; society changes; culture changes. Change is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we should be less expansive, we must learn from the past and improve on the futute.