Social media: Causing Isolation?

Social Networking sites have increased dramatically in popularity over the past 5 years. In the article titled Does Social Media cause A More Isolated Society, Yukio Strachan writes about Sherry Turkle's viewpoint on the subject and her personal viewpoint about it as well. According to Sherry Turkle, social media sites have cause our society to become more isolated. She sees social media as something that changes who we are as well as what we do. In her opinion, we are learning and getting used to "being alone together." While Yukio Strachan agrees with Sherry Turkle, she also believes that social media is not the cause of isolation, just a contributing factor. In my opinion, social media has caused our society to be more isolated and dependent on social media sites. Sherry Turkle noted that people are expecting less from each other an "friending" someone on Facebook or another social networking site allows for people to create emotional distance and diminishing face to face interactions. Yukio Strachan believes that the isolation has always existed in our society and that social media is simply bringing the issue to light. However, I think that the new technology is what created isolation to be an actual issue. In "the good old days" people picked up a telephone and called (not text) the person they wanted to talk to. At the dinner table, families would interact and talk to each other. Now, people are emailing or texting during dinner. Even though we are "more connected" we are not actually; which is what Sherry Turkle talks about in her book titled “Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other.”  While I do agree that this problem of isolation isn't something that started with technology, I do believe that it has increased because of it. I don't feel like isolation was an actual problem before all of this social media came out.




http://digitaljournal.com/article/322982