Barriers, Instagram & Facebook..

Life was not the same for Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. He said - "When I was growing up I had a hunger to socialize and interact with people. Social media did not stop me from going out or seeing people. In fact, it helped me remember more people than I did before."

Do you think that it would have been possible 20 years back? No, not at all.

Social media was created to facilitate new relationships and maintain friendships in this fast-paced world of ours. It has accelerated global and local communication at speeds that were unattainable in the past. Social media and communication is the backbone of social interaction.

Social media eliminates the factor of distance, a factor that actually deters people from being more social. Social media helps us attend to everything in our lives on time. The new generation is being smarter because of the facilities of social media and is excelling in their studies as they surf the net and get more and more information about their subject.

Friends and families countries apart now feel closer to each other. Long-distance relationships are now a reality. Sitting in India you can instantly get news from America to Syria. You can observe different views of different people on certain aspects.

All this is not possible during the days when it took a month or more for letters to reach one place to another when newspapers took a day or two to report the happenings of another country.

Social media is a path from which you can make people aware of certain causes. Many social campaigns are being organized to enlighten people. For example, Sadhguru is one of the people who think for the benefit of the country and has organized a social campaign for the conservation of water. There are also many campaigns that are circulated just by posting one tweet on Twitter.

Yes, we see more and more people texting or chatting with their friends while waiting for something. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are being antisocial, they are probably being social with someone else, on the other side of the chat room.

People might say that social media encourages suicide depression etc. but that's wrong because you are looking at the negative side of the thing instead of the positive side.

For some, social media can be a place where people become happier, more social and stop getting depressed.

What is the harm in that? Social media is encouraging positive emotions in people. Just because negative things do happen because of social media doesn't mean negative things are the only things that happen.

My family is connected with our relatives in different parts of the world and the country through social media sites like WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Duo. There are people who use social media to plan old friend reunions and family get together. It is because they use social media to their advantage.

   

Thus, I do not think it is right to blame social media for making us less social, it is we ourselves who have created distances and barriers.