Shawn Day

English

Persuasive essay

Social Media fails at true friendship

Like the car commercial where the daughter makes fun of her parents only having nineteen friends on facebook yet she has over six hundred. True friendships are rarely made through social media. The term friend in today’s internet prone world has become so over used much like saying I love you with every crush. What people growing up with social media think is their friends are nothing more than acquaintance’s.

Friends are people that will go to a funeral with you, will loan you money when times are hard, will come over and spend hours with you just talk when you’re feeling down just to cheer you up.  With social media many people have acquaintance’s that they talk to from time to time about different things  and some of those people they may not even know what they look like yet in today’s world they call them friends.

“Social media forces upon us a feeling of intimacy and closeness that doesn’t actually exist.”  By Jay Baer.

Just because you talk to someone with any form of social media such as email, public Twitter, Twitter DM, public Facebook, Facebook messages, Facebook chat, Linkedin messages, public Google +, Google + messages, blog comments, Skype, text messages, Instagram, phone, voice mail, and several topically or geographically specific forums, groups and social networks. These form of connecting rarily creates a real friendship, if you got shot and died sure all of them would talk about it but how many of your say six-hundred “friends” would actually come to your funeral, how many would sit down with your parents, spouse, kids to help them through the tough times? This is why I don’t like social media while it has us talking to more and more people we never would’ve met otherwise to many people in today’s society are trading out or neglecting real friends for talking to people they hardly know online.

A study done by schools.com as well as USA Today found that real world friendships involve more interdependence, breadth, depth, understanding, and commitment. Twenty four percent of people surveyed said they missed important life moments because they were too busy trying to share something on social media sites.

With social media we meet a lot of people yet spend less time going out and making new life long relationships. Before social media I remember being at a different friend’s house every weekend barbecuing and several of my really good friends I met at these events themselves being invited by someone else there. Or organizing sports games like football, baseball, bowling on a weekly basis.

There seems there is always something to talk about with all of these outlet’s we have in today’s world, but how many of the things we say has any meaning anymore. I watch my kids on facebook, texting, online gaming, emailing, yet with all of these things they don’t have any friends. They sit at home on their computers and its like pulling teeth to get them to go outside or anywhere with us to do activities. My son who is five has about 7 different boys who knock on the door daily asking for him to play or to see if he can go somewhere with them such as swimming. These are youthful friendships that have some meat to them. He has people who actually want to hang out with him, go places with him, even ask him if he’s ok when he gets hurt and bring him home to us. While my three daughter’s only hang out with their cousins. They range in age at nine, thirteen, fifteen and my nine year old recently went somewhere with a real world friend because I stress the importance of meeting real people to her, but my two oldest never have friends over they never go to visit any friends. They claim they have lots of friends and yet never leave the house to hang out with anyone. They chat online constantly, but when they are older what childhood memories will they have of their friends?

While social media helps to better connect us to the world and share things with family or even keep in touch with family over long distances it is eroding our ability to make new friends that will care about us. It’s harder in today’s society to get people to hang out together as often as was once common. It’s lowered our expectations of what we expect from our relationships with others.