Weekend Writing #2

Does technology make us more alone?

To be honest, it really depends on your definition of being alone. Does being alone mean that you don’t physically interact with people in the world or meet face-to-face? Or does it mean that you just don’t talk or interact with other people in general? As technology improves more and more, more of us are logging into social media sites and apps as well as networking and chat rooms. All of those are meant for people to use and share, chat, and make friends on. People will post every living moment of their day onto the internet and share it with people. As I am typing this, I have Skype on my second screen and I am multi-tasking between work and being social. 1Back in 1998, an experiment was conducted by Kraut et al. that correlated the use of internet with relationships in life and isolation. It was initially proven that by using the internet, people became more anti-social. But, four years later in 2002, the experiment was conducted again, but all of the negativity that was shown in the earlier test, wasn’t there anymore.1 In fact, the year after, Microsoft released Skype. And a year after that, Facebook was released. Somewhere during those years in between the experiments, people must have realized the functionality of the internet and started to develop ways to harness it. With people starting to use the internet for communication and networking, the increase of people turning antisocial turned onto the decline and for the better. Fast forward to 2015. Skype has had 12 years of improvement, Facebook has 11, and we have even more networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. The only way that one could be alone thanks to technology is if they refuse to connect with others using it.

Bibliography

1“Does The Internet Improve Social Relationships and Psychological Well-Being?” Tasty Research. N.p., 2006. Web. 4 Oct. 2015. <http://tastyresearch.com/2006/08/31/does-the-internet-improve-social-relationships-and-psychological-well-being/>

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