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Social Media, A Force for Connection or Not?


Lilly

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But the communication is very shallow and two dimensional. It's worrying that people have nothing better to do with their time and energy than FB and twit.

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Its a good thing to think about for sure.

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I agree with Border that electronic communication promotes the illusion of intimacy. People, especially youth, may use it to "connect," but all bets are off when the 'off' button is pushed or the power goes out. Interpersonal skills that necessitate face-to-face contact are underused or, worse yet, never developed at all.

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You can empathise with a person when you've had a similar experience to what they are having , but you cant possibly be thinking the same thoughts.Empathy can be good when its used wisely, but I think that today people are using the internet to communicate rather than having face to face discussion.Everyone seems to have a cell phone glued to their ear instead of waiting until they actually see the person to have a chat.

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It's like I posted back a while ago, that I was bugged with Facebook because half of the kids I went to high school with but didn't know on a personal level, didn't hang out with at all, were asking to be my friend just so they could get there status up

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Social media is a tool, neither inherently good nor bad. What's critical, I think, is how it's used.

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  • 2 weeks later...

For friends and family i see in person. We just talk on the cell phone or in person.

For friends I have in other states social media is great!

Overall spending to much time on social networks can make you lose time with your loved ones in person.

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For the last year I've been housebound for health reasons, and can do the work my former employer sends me (and generously keeps paying me my salary for) in half an hour. My family and neighbors visit, but they have their own lives so I have to be careful not to demand too much attention.

That leaves the internet and TV. Thanks but I'll take the internet. Still, one can only spend so much time reading the news and interesting articles, and I'm a fast reader. I suppose I could take up some course of study, and did but finished the courses and didn't learn much I didn't already know.

These web chats sites give me a chance to not just talk to people but to be entertained other ways (such as how off the wall some people are whom I would never meet in my ordinary life). Besides, I can't argue with friends over politics and religion. It isn't done in polite circles, but internet is not polite (necessarily -- I try to be).

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  • 2 weeks later...

Social media is a tool, neither inherently good nor bad. What's critical, I think, is how it's used.

^yes. Any sort of communication can unite or divide.

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I strongly doubt these chat sites or the comments we are invited to attach to various stories and articles have much if any effect and are even read my more than a handful of people.

It is probable that some nefarious and some not-so-nefarious groups collect data from them to get an idea of public opinion or whatever, but I doubt they get anything very useful.

Historians years from now may also comb them to get an idea of the culture, and will be similarly mislead.

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"Social" media as redefined "social activity" as being something one can engage in while physically isolated from any other human being. In the sense it reinforces the perception of 'person' as the intellectual being, rather than the physical being, it may be seen as being a positive. In the sense that it also reinforces physical isolation and facilitates the development of social anxieties through the person becoming accustomed to physical isolation, it may be seen as being a negative.

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"Social" media as redefined "social activity" as being something one can engage in while physically isolated from any other human being. In the sense it reinforces the perception of 'person' as the intellectual being, rather than the physical being, it may be seen as being a positive. In the sense that it also reinforces physical isolation and facilitates the development of social anxieties through the person becoming accustomed to physical isolation, it may be seen as being a negative.

I guess maybe so.
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I think Social Media is awesome when it's used properly. I credit Facebook for getting me back out in the world and being social with real people far more than I EVER have. I can be out and about and cast out a WIDE message on Facebook stating I'm near XYZ restaurant and I'm going to have lunch, is anyone in the area interested in meeting me? One post and done, and there's usually a taker or two out there. Previous to social media, I'd have most likely been eating alone.

Then there's the calendar aspect of tools like Facebook as well. I can sign up to receive notifications at places like museums, or parks, or clubs or bars and at any given moment know what's going on that I might be interested in doing, I can share that event and see if any one of my 400 friends (who are really friends) want to go too. With one click of a mouse, it's on my calendar. No fuss, no muss.

Of course, like with all tools, especially tools which rely on social skills, I have seen Facebook go very wrong. Mostly, I ignore that junk. To have a positive experience with a tool like Facebook, you have to use your brain with it.

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It's a handier way of getting in contact with people and you get to avoid the annoyance of prolonged conversation and voices. You want someone to stop talking? Log out or block them.

That being said, many people like to misinterpret soulless text and as such, can get all SNIP about it. So make sure to use your emoticons lest you SNIP off their loyal followers on *Twitter*.

Edited by Lilly
language issues
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I don't like emoticons; they are illiterate devices and should be used rarely if at all. Try to work on your English to make it more effective.

I use the smiley face now and then or the thumbs up, but not as part of the message but just as a gesture.

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I don't like emoticons; they are illiterate devices and should be used rarely if at all. Try to work on your English to make it more effective.

I like emoticons; they don't have any bearing on ones literacy level IMO.

The more the merrier!

d035.gif

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One of the good things about social media connections is that people are able to communicate with reduced psychological barriers that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in real life. But when someone acquires it as their only way of connecting with people or is addicted to it then it becomes a problem because they lose touch with reality and can no longer deal with real world interactions. You can see that quite often in people who do role playing in forums all the time.

I spend very less time online because I have a very busy life. I won't give away much information about my relations offline but I will say that I am satisfied and happy with my "offline" life and have never felt the need to even talk about personal matters with someone online much less feel the need to establish any online relationships. I do prefer solitude from time to time in real life, though. But mostly because it helps me develop and shape my spiritual side in a way that I intend to; I also do certain spiritual practices that help me develop and maintain a good intuition and those require solitude too.

Anyway, I do have many social connections both offline and online. But most of my communications with them online are of purely religious nature and nothing more. I do not connect with anyone online on a personal level though. Now you can call me a prude but I even despise idle chatting online, especially flirting; never done that; don't even know how to. No offense to those who do it or consider it not an idle activity.

One of the worst things about most of the social media connections is that they are based on online personas. You do not know the real person behind that persona unless you have technical skills or "psychic" skills to unmask that persona. Thus, I find it funny how sometimes people get emotionally attached to each other's personas online. I think that this sort of attitude is not only silly but is also very risky and dangerous. I find it even funnier when people like these project their own traits and emotions onto others and think of others as desperate as themselves. I come across people like these sometimes online and it is very difficult to communicate with them when I mean business or when I am being genuinely hostile. What makes it worse is the limited communication passageway of the social media that often leads to myriad miscommunications that no emoticons can dispel. And in my case it is made further worse when I am communicating in English because it is not my first language and my statements sometimes retain translation artifacts from mandarin that sometimes lead to misunderstandings.

It once happened that I communicated with an opponent party online regarding a dispute that I knew was surely heading only in one direction… in the end, they would send a legal notice to someone (or to many people) against something that was perfectly legal in the recipients country/countries, and the recipients would just tear it in pieces and throw it away. The objective of communicating in advance was to make them be aware of the seriousness of the situation so that they would be prepared in advance. It would be unfair to not let them know. Our group was motivated purely by religious factors and nothing more. The online communication went back and forth for several days. At one point, however, I got a perplexing response from one of the members of the opponent group. Instead of a legal notice, I received something that seemed like a gentle let down. One of the members of the group, a woman that was around the age of my mom and was the polar opposite of me and incompatible with me in every way, somehow started thinking that I was infatuated with her or something like that. She was one of those that maintain an online persona that attracts a lot of men and she did attract a lot of them in social media but I was definitely not one of them. Apart from the usual misunderstandings that plague online communications, her prolonged role playing in the social media seemed to have impaired her real world perceptions and fooled her into perceiving a genuine hostile as an amorous fool. The opponents eventually realized the seriousness of the situation and their real "roles", and in the end, some people did receive legal notices from them, and it felt really satisfying. Because that was exactly how it needed to be.

Edited by XingWi
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I just happened across this: http://startempathy....-and-loneliness

So, what do you think? I tend to see social media as distancing people from putting effort into face to face contact...but it does make it easier to communicate (at least on one level).

I think it can be positive or negative, for people in Frank’s situation it’s a really good thing, but how many live their lives texting /twitter/ face book and so miss so much going on around them. I have been travelling around the Mediterranean and didn’t / don't take all my devices with me (laptop/galaxy pad or phone) but I am having a great time. I think this video makes some very good points.

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Eh, I don't think you can make anything other than a shallow connection at best

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It's a handier way of getting in contact with people and you get to avoid the annoyance of prolonged conversation and voices. You want someone to stop talking? Log out or block them.

That being said, many people like to misinterpret soulless text and as such, can get all SNIP about it. So make sure to use your emoticons lest you SNIP off their loyal followers on *Twitter*.

Yes blocking, what a nice feature. Only three in four years. Is that good or bad?

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One of the things that I do like about social media is that the public can quickly become aware of important topics, or even relatively unimportant things that wouldn't otherwise make it to the newspaper.

For example, a year ago there was a lady in my state who was being harassed by a big corporation. I'm not too sure of the exact details, but I remember it was definitely shady on the corporation's part. The lady in question posted her situation on social media and it quickly went viral. A local news station picked up the story, and as you can imagine, the corporation issued a public apology the very next day, and the lady was never bothered again.

This brings into question the whole concept of vigilante justice, but it was certainly a positive outcome in this situation, and others I'm sure.

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One of the things that I do like about social media is that the public can quickly become aware of important topics, or even relatively unimportant things that wouldn't otherwise make it to the newspaper.

For example, a year ago there was a lady in my state who was being harassed by a big corporation. I'm not too sure of the exact details, but I remember it was definitely shady on the corporation's part. The lady in question posted her situation on social media and it quickly went viral. A local news station picked up the story, and as you can imagine, the corporation issued a public apology the very next day, and the lady was never bothered again.

This brings into question the whole concept of vigilante justice, but it was certainly a positive outcome in this situation, and others I'm sure.

It is great that it worked in the lady's favor. I assume she did not have enough evidence to sue them in court and that is why she had to resort to the social media approach. The corporation must have definitely been guilty of harassment otherwise they could have likewise accused her of libel instead of apologizing.

The example you provided is a case of workplace harassment. But I think this method of "going viral" can also be employed by someone facing online harassment in social media. In the context of social media, repeatedly bothering someone with distressing messages on a particular social media website after the person is clearly told to stop is considered harassment. This applies to social media websites where users use real names and identities, and the behavior can have legal repercussions if the harasser continues even after he is clearly told to stop in that particular website, provided the IP address used by him there can be traced back to him. Forums, although classified as social media, are places where members use pseudonyms, so they have their own custom definitions of harassment, and harassers are dealt at a private level by the admins/mods of the forums themselves, instead of users having to deal with them legally. Also same behavior could be interpreted differently in different forums. Then in forum discussions, what an individual considers harassment also varies from person to person and I guess each tries to play the victim card at some point, LOL. I recall, in one forum, there was a person that was specifically debating with one or two members all the time and was being accused of being a harasser by them, and in response his opponents were using multiple accounts (sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry) to sway the argument in their favor and they were accused of being harassers too.

I liked what you said about "vigilante justice" and it is great that social media can also be used to obtain justice this way, although in some rare cases this method may act as a double-edged sword. Consider a hypothetical situation in which a spiritual guru's hidden agenda (or his frauds) in his social media activities is exposed by a journalist and his information is placed on a webserver in one of the countries that has virtually no internet privacy laws, like China, Japan, Singapore or any other such country. The action of the exposé would be legal, and some would consider it morally right and some (especially the followers/fans of the guru) would consider it morally wrong. The guru can call the exposé a harasser and accuse him of online harassment, but because it is not possible to get the material taken down legally (owing to the different internet privacy laws in different countries) he may resort to the viral social media approach among his followers, and it will definitely put some pressure on the exposé but at the same time going viral this way will also expose the guru even more and it will further the exposé's own agenda because that is exactly what he wished to achieve in the first place – to expose. And it will work even more in the favor of the exposé if the exposé is on a VPN, like some whistleblowers are, because then it will be impossible to reach him directly unless he has broken any laws in the VPN country, so it may not be possible to put any pressure on him at all. But I think cases like these are very rare and that is why I said "hypothetical". So yeah, for the most part I think going viral in social media can also help people get justice based on subjective morality when it is not possible to get the justice legally.

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Eh, I don't think you can make anything other than a shallow connection at best

I'm not sure what makes a connection shallow or deep. We are all isolated ships floating by each other with only words to enable us to try to convey what we are, and words don't succeed. Sometimes on these boards in just one message I get more than years of association; usually, of course, not.
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Yes blocking, what a nice feature. Only three in four years. Is that good or bad?

I often don't read what a certain person posts 'cause I know I would be irritated, so why should I block them?
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