Can Social Media make you Anti-Social? devastate your real social skills?

[Unes]

Social media can be so powerful and so time consuming. Nowadays, most people spend hours sifting through tweets, updating fb statues, commenting on other people's (they haven't met in real life) image.. etc, none of these are necessarily 'bad' nor 'good', the issue is that social media (your digital world) can badly affect your social skills (your everyday reality), of course, based on the way you use social media.

So, can Social Media make you Anti-Social? can social media ruin your social skills? and why/why not so?

Share your opinion honestly with clear arguments

[banananose_89117]

I would answer yes. You are dealing indirectly with others and human beings are social animals. Even in the days when pioneers were miles apart, they would find time for church or other special occasions like a dance to get together. Humans are not meant to be alone.

You cannot hug an electronic message or look into the person's eyes, or kiss them, etc.

I use email and IM but rather see the person and enjoy a special social activity like a meal or movie. In the case of friends far away, traveling to see them or phone calls to actually hear their voice is my choice.

How do you really know and trust the person on the other end of an electronic communication? You can create your ideal or what you think they want to hear, when face to face you can at least see them as a human and evaluate their honesty.

[anon]

Anti-Social refers to the personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy towards others. I think you have your terms mixed up. Social media doesn't make you a psychopath. I think social media creates very distorted relationships with people. They can talk all they want online and be normal, but in real life they don't know how to actually talk to people and get along.

[BreakingMatt]

It can hurt your social skills, but not make you anti-social. When you are anti-social, you're basically reclusive; the smallest elements of social norms and niceties are almost foreign to you. So, no, unless you've endured significant psychological trauma or have a disorder of some kind, social media can not make you anti-social.

But like I said, it can absolutely hurt your social skills. Part of what constitues the mental health of a human being is social interaction; communicating with other people is extremely vital. It assists our esteem, confidence, perception and general attitude towards many things.

Even though you are still talking with people via. social media, the concept of word-to-word speech is obtuse.

Social Media should never substitue social interaction, but merely be there as a device to talk to people who you can't keep in contact with, and sometimes, just for a general chat. But now, Facebook, in particular, is centered around family/friends having entire conversations on Facebook when their in walking distance of each other.

By spending extensive periods of times on Facebook, you're adapting your brain to a certain "style" of communication; one where moving your mouth and talking is becoming obscure. A type of style where you sit down and are using your fingers to do the talking. If you spend too much time on Facebook or Twitter and end up talking to more people on the net than in real life, you are, basically, teaching your body a new way to communicate, and due to being on the net too much, it becomes the dominate way for yourself to "say" something to someone else.

Come to the situation where you are in an actual social conversation, you may feel somewhat awkward and anxious. This is because speech conversation is no longer the main form of communication your body and brain going through.

So basically, too much time with social media can affect your perception and actions of mere communication. This is where it "hurts" or "affects" your social skills, doesn't make you anti-social, per-se.

Great question.