Apoorv Agarwal 2473,

Ajmer House

Social Networking is Making us

More Antisocial
-Writing in favour of the motion

Designed to connect lives, these "social media" platforms are working

in the contrast of their initial termed jobs, and breaking connections
and lives. Saying so it's clear, I'll be in the favour of the topic. Every
thing has its sides. Social networking too has its fair share of pros and
cons. While we can always find new connections online, we tend to
forget about those already made offline. While we can always
appreciate the posts of our idol or favourite influencer on instagram
with the comments and likes, you can always be exposed to cyber
bullying or shames by the same. I shall attack the subject by breaking
my say in the following parts.
1. Losing a sight of the real life with too much influence
of the virtual world.
As we try to gain thousands of followers and hundreds of likes and
comments on our new instagram post, we tend to exaggerate our life
and we forget about the reality. Posing in front of a Porsche you
found parked at a plaza with captions, #newkeys won't get you a
Porsche, only thing you may get is an embarrassing situation when
you meet a person who believed the post. You may get 10s of DMs
daily but never lift an eye to the mother who toils for you 24/7, help
your father who worked his back off to pay your bills. Also, studies
have proven that the higher the usage of these sites, the higher the
feeling of isolation. "When a person is spending more and more time
on social media, they are disconnecting with themselves. It's not the
real life multidimensional experience of connecting and feeling a
sense of belonging." These words by Dr. Shannon Poppito, a
psychologist, thoroughly mark my above statements.
Apoorv Agarwal 2473,
Ajmer House

2. Marks a lag of Emotional Connection and

decreases Face-to-Face communication skills.
We rightly do make new friends and connections online. But the
conversations we have with them online can almost never be with the
same emotions one can have while in a physical conversation. We
may use the the laughing 'emojis' while in an online chat, but we may
never mean that, it's just a simple click of certain keys in the
keyboard to send one such emoji. It's so common and easy to fake
your emotions online. You may never know what the person at the
other end of the chat really feels and bears. It also makes a person
less interactive while in a face to face conversation, they get so used to
chat in the online way, when facing each other, they don't have words
or topics to talk on.
3. Depression and anxiety caused by various vertices
of social networking.
With the posting of any new photo on our social networking handles
we all have the habit of anxiously checking our devices every 2
minutes to see the reaction of our peers and followers, the number of
likes, the comments, the shares. And with every post comes the hate.
The hate messages, the hate comments. Which shame in every way
they can, be it looking too gay, too thin, too overweight, and the list
may go on. All this which results in the anxiety, and you believing all
this. An introvert is not a person who was born shy and quiet. She or
he was silenced, silenced by such comments, over nights and days
months and seasons. And with social media, the network has
expanded so much, now a random stranger from the other part of
the world can bully you into thinking the above. With the rise of
social networking, we have seen the rise of cyber bullying and the rise
of such incidents where people either took their lives or opted a more
quieter and antisocial life.
2
Apoorv Agarwal 2473,
Ajmer House

With all said I would close my dialogue by the following lines, "It's
possible that one of the reasons people continue to use social media
is the need to fill a void. But, ironically, social media has created a
new void in our lives."