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Since the advent of social media, the landscape of our day-to-day conversations has been alternated tremendously. Social media became a platform for us to easily keep in touch with our friends and family, or meet new friends online while speeding up our communication as they are only one text away. However, a study published in 1998 looking into the phenomenon of social media contributing to social isolation, following 169 people during the first two years of their Internet use, found that greater use of the Internet was associated with the decline of participants' communication with friends and family while increasing their loneliness. Hence, social isolation has been one of the impairments of social media as social media lowers an individual's self-esteem, causing dependency on social media and replacing face-to-face interactions.
According to the Harris Poll conducted between late March and early May, between 46% and 51% of adults in the United States have been using social media more since the outbreak of Coronavirus began. One of the implications of increased social media use is low self-esteem, leading to social isolation. As an elucidation, individuals are exposed to unrealistic or distorted portrayals, which is deemed a fallacy of how life is considered perfect based on an idealized picture. Individuals bombarded by the perfect selfies and lifestyles are devoted to scrutinizing the perfect image of other people and making comparisons with themselves, which are then portrayed in a negative light if they are unable to comprehend how the photoshopped and heavily edited photos are not true reflections of real life. Besides, social media websites took advantage of the human psyche and its rewards system, creating a dopamine-driven feedback loop to condition users to stay online, keeping them on social media which eventually leads to them feeling socially isolated. This also forces users to follow beauty standards as the dopamine-driven feedback loops promoting short bursts of happiness trick them into posting 'perfect' images. Therefore, unrealistic beauty standards and the dopamine-driven feedback loop have impacted the self-esteem of individuals, making communication daunting for them in real life.
The dependency on social media during any form of interaction has brought a decreased depth of interaction while creating a more superficial social exchange. The more engaging and easily accessed world of social media has been our coping mechanism to escape any awkward social situation. Instead of coping with the inevitable awkwardness, one should be gregarious and try to initiate a conversation with other people, as social awkwardness are sometimes a catalyst for making new acquaintances. Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Elizabeth Dunn and Ryan Rwyer from the University of British Columbia in Canada found that those who were on their phones during a face-to-face interaction enjoyed the interaction lesser than those who put down their phones as they texted the subjects of the research for more than 5 times a day for a week to ask about their emotions and their recent activities. Therefore, I advocate that society nowadays is more detached from society nowadays as they are more devoted to staring at their smartphone screens than socializing.
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