Did you know that living in social isolation has been associated with unhealthy habits and higher rates of mortality?1
To fully function, we humans need social contact as much as we need a healthy diet and a good sleep. Historically, we were only able to interact physically, and while the invention of the telephone in 1876 made it possible to speak with one another at any given distance, the Internet has completely revolutionised the concept of human interaction. Of particular interest in this new paradigm of communication is the role of ‘Social Media’. This recent new way of socialisation, which skyrocketed with the arrival of Facebook (some time between 2007 and 2008), lead to the creation of communities that only exist in the virtual world – known as ‘Digital Communities’.
There are currently more than 100 Social Media websites (including online dating sites)2. It is worth noting that although ‘Social Media’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘Social Networks´, they do not represent the same concept. Indeed, while ‘Social Media’ is a broad term that encompasses the electronic tools that people use to share information (i.e., Websites, apps)3, ‘Social Networks’ are the actual platform that facilitates and encourages users to create a profile so that they can interact with other individuals or groups of interest (i.e., Facebook).
Although Social Media was initially aimed to connect individuals for socialisation purposes, nowadays its proliferation is such that a great amount of business rely on this ‘new digital world’ for advertising, sales, and ultimately to provide customer service. Not surprisingly, a recent report4 has shown that eight in 10 Australians are social media users.
CRITICISMS TO SOCIAL MEDIA
It is characteristic for every big shift in humanity to entail criticisms, and the arrival of ‘Social Networks’ is clearly not the exception. For example, in a very popular TED Talk5 Sherry Turkle warned that a constant use of social networks will be likely to disengage us from what really matters – the human (physical) contact. Turkle’s viewpoint is by no means an isolated critique, but it reflects the concern of many sociologists, psychologists, and scholars from various fields6. Nevertheless, there is another group of scholars who have been studying the social media phenomena who seem to have a less pessimistic yet critical view about social networks. Instead of assuming that these will sooner or later lead to the apocalypse of natural human interactions, researchers like Siapera7 focus on how this new technology will transform us as societies, without rushing to draw conclusions. Personally, I believe that this viewpoint is way more constructive than the one which reduces social media to a mere problem which requires urgent intervention.
After all, do humans possess a unique and intrinsic way of communicating, or is this rather a feature that is constantly evolving?
References
Gillespie, T 2010, 'The politics of platforms', New Media & Society, vol. 12, no. 3, Sage.
Mehra, G 2017, ‘105 Leading Social Networks Worldwide’, Practical Ecommerce, viewed November 18, <https://www.practicalecommerce.com/105-leading-social-networks-worldwide>.
Murthy, D 2013, Twitter: Social communication in the Twitter age, Wiley, New York.
Sensis 2017, ‘Social media report 2017’, 22 June, viewed 12 November 2017, <https://www.sensis.com.au/asset/PDFdirectory/Sensis_Social_Media_Report_2017-Chapter-1.pdf>.
Siapera, E 2012, 'Socialities and Social Media', in Understanding New Media, Sage, London, pp. 191-208.
Steptoe, A., Shankar, A., Demakakos, P. and Wardle, J., 2013, ‘Social isolation, loneliness, and all-cause mortality in older men and women’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 110, no 15, pp. 5797-5801.
Turkle, S 2013, ‘Connected, but alone?’, TED-Ed 2013, viewed 7 November 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv0g8TsnA6c>.
