SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE ANTISOCIAL Maria M. (2n BATX A)

SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE ANTI-SOCIAL

Social networks are becoming every day more important in our daily life. We don’t just use them to meet new people with who we share interests, activities, origins or connections. We also use them to talk to people we have in our closest environment. But do they make us anti-social?

First of all, I must clarify what the term anti-social actually refers to: unwilling or unable to associate in a normal or friendly way with other people. That’s the first definition we get when we look for “anti-social meaning” on Google. So, my answer is very clear: social networks AREN’T anti-social.

When we use social media, we interact with many other users. For example, on Instagram we can share our own photos and stories, like, comment, answer to others, tag, message and follow everyone we want to. Obviously, this isn’t such as real as communicating face-to-face and, of course I’m sure that if we didn’t follow that amount of people on Instagram, we wouldn’t know about them for years and life would keep walking by. That makes me kind of sad and dependable of Instagram, but it doesn’t mean make me anti-social, because I can keep talking to people face-to-face and also, talk to people I don’t necessarily see every day. Social media gives us a lot of content to comment and share with our friends and followers, which sometimes, opens discussions. In fact, they allow us to talk from, literally, any part of the world.

I have a friend who is staying in Perú for two months and social media are a free way to communicate with her. I mean, you only need Internet and an application that works, but that’s everything. That facilitates so much communicating with her, and I’m sure her family appreciates it a lot. And not just that…, you can also become friends with someone you would have never met in real life through Internet.

I can tell, by my own experience, that social media gives us the chance to make new friends and meet people. I joined Twitter many years ago and there I met online people from all ages which shared interests with me, such as following a concrete artist which no one near me followed. That’s what we call “Internet Friends”: people you meet online who you become friends with. For sure it is dangerous, and my mum has always warned me about people I’ve talked to, but if I hadn’t met as many people as I have thanks to social media, my life would be so different now. I mean, I’ve listened many times to the quote “Distance means nothing when someone means everything” and social media do really maintain us connected with people all around the world! Isn’t that something amazing?

However, it’s everyone’s decision whether to meet a friend and talk face-to-face to them or to keep looking at their phone-screen; it’s not Twitter’s election. It’s you who decides to use less or more a social media, even when it is obvious, they are a vice. It’s you who decides to write a stranger a message or to avoid them at all costs. It’s actually you, who is anti-social.

And there’s a thing you can’t deny: social media allow us to have someone near us when we are really, really far away. And that’s simply unbelievable.

Maria Maroto Amigó

2^nd BTX “A”