Communication Distortion for Students

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”
– George Bernard Shaw

It’s estimated that 800 million people worldwide are using Facebook and connecting through Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. The majority of users on such sites being students and young adults. These such users have become a heavily researched subject over the past few years. The topics popularity and innovation allow communication to grow at a rapid rate. This addictive high of social media and the compulsion to keep all platforms up to date have combined to make it harder than ever for today’s students to create their own unaffected online persona.

While studies haven’t revealed social media to be the societal evil that some have played it up as being, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t influencing our lives. For example, it affects how we as students act and think, often in ways you may not even realize. This is causing some very real effects on us and the way in which we communicate with one another. This is alongside being manipulated into believing and seeing content that isn’t real or appropriate for our self-esteem.

In many ways, social media is simply one aspect of the growing up in this generation. We grow alongside the media that we know and love. Students constantly work on several projects whilst at university and are inundated with the latest news, information, and updates from our social media (important or not). Social media isn’t alone in emphasizing our preoccupation problems, but it causes the majority. It’s most distracting and widely used way that people divide their attention. Especially since smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other gadgets have made it easier to bring these distractions with them anywhere.

Although the trouble with this obsessive relationship is that students prefer to use social media to communicate with one another. This online phenomenon is now manipulating our interests and the way in which we communicate with our family, friends and online community.As communication and information travel faster and faster between the younger society, our world seems to get smaller and smaller.

One of the biggest changes in the way that we interact, due to social media networks, is the sheer number of people that we can interact with. Others humor, language and presentation of themselves online affects the way in which we represent ourselves too. It’s a domino effect. Current students are at the perfect age to experience all that the media has to offer. There is a clear correlation between students and what popular topics are evident on social media all following similar trends. This allows students interests to become distorted to whatever is popular at the time. None of this communication distortion for students is intended. It’s simply inevitable for the technological time that we live in now.

WHY AS STUDENTS SHOULD WE CARE?

The influence of social media has the ability to easily manipulate anyone online. We have to stand and become our own people. We should do our own thing and not conform to what is seen as “cool” online. Discuss new topics such as politics and current events, not memes all about them. Students need to wake up and see the future that they’re going to be living in once the university bubble bursts.

University isn’t forever.