With the advent of new media such as social media platforms like Tumblr and Facebook, our tech-savvy generation has been lambasted constantly with the criticism that we have degraded into poorer communicators, or people who lack the ability to articulate their thoughts clearly and take in differing viewpoints. Has new media, such as Youtube, really eroded our conversational skills in real life, or has it simply provided another platform for us to air our views? New media has indeed traded off our conversational abilities to a large extent, due to the constraints and speedy nature of new media, erosion of essential interpersonal communication techniques, and the lack of a friendly environment that encourages meaningful dialogue, despite it being the original intention of new media.

Some critics have argued that new media has however provided users with the liberty to express anything they feel strongly about, and such freedom provides numerous opportunities for us to improve our articulation of opinions and coherence of arguments. For instance, websites like Debate.org encourages visitors to take a stance and provide compelling reasons as supporting arguments, and those with convincing arguments will receive “Thumbs Up” and approval from other browsers. With new media providing and opening up a cornucopia of platforms for free expression, improvements in structuring out our train of thought can be achieved easily, making us better communicators as we can provide a more structured and compelling argument with more practice using new media.

However, such new media platforms do not manage to attain such idealistic noble purposes after starting up. Firstly, new media has its own constraints and its speedy nature has hindered its ability, or its aim, to make us better communicators to improve our argumentative skills. With greater ease of sending out Facebook posts or a Tweet, many users do not place as much time and effort in crafting out their content; in short, quantity is valued over quality. The culture of speed-typing and racing to post about your opinion in a matter of seconds does not help to improve our communication and articulation skills, if we are not putting in effort to do so. In addition, constraints which some new media have, such as the 140 characters in Twitter, only serves to encourage “Tweeters” to use broken sentence structures and colloquial language to bring their points across with a stringent character restriction. Emojis in Whatsapp have often been used as a substitute, or a go-to when friends are unable to express their emotions in words. All these are real constraints of new media which do not help to improve our communication skills in real life, and their immensely convenient and speedy nature has not helped in enhancing our ability to articulate thoughts. In fact, they have been compromised and have made us poorer communicators.

Secondly, new media has largely eroded our interpersonal skills as it has greatly replaced face-to-face interactions which have been key in shaping our conversational techniques. With new media being more prevalent and convenient, many users have resorted to it for communication purposes. However, skills such as reading expressions, body gestures and social awareness have all been compromised; a survey conducted has shown that body gestures are the key traits which communicators in real life look out for, and not the content of the speech. Evidently, when such personal interactions have been replaced by lifeless “talking” through Whatsapp, we are unable to improve these important communication skills that serve to help us understand better what is being said. In addition, new media has provided us with the luxury of time to craft out our responses slowly before replying, instead of facing the stress to respond instantaneously in a face-to-face meet-up. As such, it has often been argued that new media has robbed our conversations of their personal touch, and made more of us socially awkward or inept. Hence, new media has eroded these essential interpersonal skills that form an integral part in real-life communications, and has made us poorer communicators in reality.

Thirdly, new media presents and encourages a very one-sided viewpoint to all, and does not impart a diverse range of viewpoints, contradictory to what it aims to do. To meet the needs of the entire online population, new media has invested much effort in sieving out the content we want to view; Faceboook and Instagram have also used such algorithms to predict users’ preferences. Hence, one feature of new media is that it filters out opinions which we do not find desirable, and mainly shows us sides of the story that resonates more with us. As such, we may be blinded and sheltered from various differing opinions, and makes us poorer communicators as we will tend to be less receptive to other viewpoints, a mindset which is fuelled by new media. In addition, a culture of “keyboard warriors” has been arising that has created a more toxic and hostile conversing platform. Online users, especially those on Tumblr, have often been noted to be lambasting other users with differing viewpoints, and maintaining extremist views as well. New media has done nothing much, or is unable to, rectify and tone down all these hostile environments, and this has fuelled the culture of maintaining one’s views with little tolerance of others’ opinions. Ignoring other opinions and furthering yours may tend to the norm in new media, and will clearly be a hinderance to moulding a generation who takes in differing viewpoints. Hence, new media and its toxic conversational and interactive environment has made us poorer communicators as we tend to be less receptive to contradictory opinions.

In conclusion, even though new media gives us the liberty to express anything under the sun, it largely depends on whether the user makes good use of this platform carefully plans out what he wants to articulate and is not subject to rash impulses. Otherwise, new media has made us poor communicators to a large extent due to its constraints and speedy nature that encourages posting without editing, erosion of essential interpersonal communication skills, and a lack of a conducive environment for meaningful interaction that makes us worse communicators, as it worsens our ability to articulate our thoughts clearly and reduces such tolerance to differing viewpoints, both which are key traits for an effective communicator.