Have you ever gone out with your friends for a nice lunch and they’re all on their phones? You can’t even have a nice conversation with them because they are constantly staring at a bright screen. Or have you ever seen someone not be able to do a speech because they are too afraid to communicate in front of a class. Social media has hurt our communication skills. We have apps such as Facetime, Instagram, twitter, etc. that distract us. Some people don’t have the ability to have a face-to-face conversation anymore, instead we look towards social media to communicate for us, we also have social media to thank for our weaker grammar skills, and social media has harmed our ability to communicate.

Social media has a major influence on why some people can’t have a face-to-face conversation. Instead we turn to text messaging, phone calls, direct messages, and facetime. In the article “ I Knew You Before I Met You: How Social Media Changed The Way We Communicate” Jennifer Brannock Cox states “Some social scientist have argued social media has actually lead to a decrease in community engagement, with more people staying online rather than meeting to participate.” It now can be considered awkward for some people to meet up because what’s the point when you could just send a message online. Social media has ruined our ability to come together as a community and communicate as a whole. We can view events from our phones instead of actually going out to the event. We also can’t have face-to-face conversations because people can get distracted by social media very easily. Cox also states “students find it very difficult to look away from the computer and focus on other productive endeavors.” We can’t seem to have a simple conversation without having to take a break to look at social media. In classrooms teachers have to assign “phone breaks” so that we don’t get on our technology during a lesson. They promise that if we can stay off of it during the lesson we can have that phone break. Jana Brech stated in her article “A survey conducted in 2012 in the UK indicates that the attention spans of children are getting shorter. The survey polled 410 English teachers and 2000 parents of children aged between two and 11. The survey showed that 91 per cent of teachers believe children’s attention spans are becoming shorter as they opt for screen-based activities over conventional reading.” 

Social media can also cause depression and self-confidence issues which could lead to less communication with other people. In the article “Excessive social media use leads to depression” Jonathan Benson writes, ”If you engage in many hours' worth of media consumption every day, or use multiple forms of media all at the same time on a regular basis, you could be making yourself prone to depression. These are the findings of a new study out of Michigan State University (MSU), which found that excessive media use, and especially media "multitasking," can lead to symptoms associated with depression and anxiety.” You may not feel like that’s why you’re depressed but studies have now shown that it is possible. Social media has also created a way for bullies to hide behind a computer screen and help create drama that will end up hurting a person. This causes the person to have confidence problems and that person won’t communicate online let alone in person because they are self conscious. In the article “Teens Obsessed with Facebook May Struggle with Anxiety, Sleep Problems” Alexis Sobel Fitts concluded that, “Investment in social media was also linked with lower self-esteem and higher levels of anxiety and depression.” If people have self-esteem issues and depression how can you expect them to be able to communicate with somebody, social media is just creating a society where sooner or later nobody will be able to communicate because they think so low of themselves.
Social media also has decreased our lack in grammar skills. Our generation doesn’t know how to use punctuation marks at the right time or how to spell without having to use spell check. We have so many new abbreviations such as lol, omg, etc. which we end up using in our writing even though it’s not grammatically correct.   David Abulafia states that “People no longer know how to write. It is a society in which fewer and fewer people read. What they do write tends to be short messages in a sort of meta-language, with meta-spelling, on Twitter and Facebook.” He also discusses that “Facebook and Twitter are sending essay skills ‘down the plug hole’.” In text messages, twitter and Facebook post we have spell check, which basically allows us not to learn from our grammar mistakes. We also have a 140 character max which helps contribute to our decrease in correct punctuation and spelling. We end having to use abbreviations and less punctuation.  Along with grammar skills you can’t tell the emotions/tone we have when we use social media. Jeff Dunn writes, “The more time students spend on social sites, the less time they spend socializing in person. Because of the lack of body signals and other nonverbal cues, like tone and inflection, social networking sites are not an adequate replacement for face-to-face communication. Students who spend a great deal of time on social networking are less able to effectively communicate in person.” Social media is taking over our way to communicate face-to-face like Jeff Dunn stated it doesn’t allow us to us body signals and other nonverbal cues, which hurts the way we communicate. We soon may no longer be able to express our emotions through body language because we won’t know how too.

Some people believe that social media helps the way we communicate. They believe it allows shy people to get out and communicate in some way with other people. Ethna Dempsey Lay says “I find twitter very useful in my writing class. It gives my quietest students a moment to own.” But in reality this may actually hurt the way a shy person communicates. They aren’t getting that face-to-face communication that they need. This only makes the situation worse because they are only learning how to communicate through technology.  In the article "The Cost of Shyness" the writer explains “Technology may be turning ours into a culture of shyness.” That whole line states it all, technology is turning our world into a culture of shyness. We are so shy that we can’t even speak in front of a class or even to a teacher.

In the end we need to learn how to have more face-to-face communication and less screen time. Also we need to not depend on spell check instead we need to depend on our common knowledge and even pick up a dictionary. It’s time to make a difference we need to put down and turn off our technology and we need to get out into the world. Social media has harmed our ability to communicate and it will only get worse, the next generation won’t even be able to communicate without social media and technology.  Let’s save communication!