Social Media, a modern tool that we humans have created in order to be more social with others from all around the world. It’s also a tool that is key in the destruction of sophisticated communication. Social Media is a device that sucks the time and creativity out of people with its many features and strives to make everyone follow certain trends so no one can stand out or be different. We are addicted to our phones and computers, and it’s showing in how we communicate regularly. For example, we now use a whole lot more pointless abbreviations in both our texts and in our spoken language. Since when did using omg and lol become a major thing that dictates every single sentence that we use in daily conversation? No one has the ability to effectively communicate anymore due to the insanity and devotion to social media that our society has described as normal.

Social media should be classified under the CDC’s list of diseases that threaten humanity, but should be labeled as a disease that does not kill off humans, but as one that destroys their sense of uniqueness and originality. To quote the article The Flight from Conversation “We sacrifice conversation” for the meer benefit of getting simple connection, or that we are so constantly on social media that we forget that we are actually supposed to be in a conversation with another person. When we log onto a social media platform, we don’t spend a couple of seconds just browsing through the feed, but we instead post new statuses and other various forms of oddities onto our profile to get more and more likes, so we can seem more popular. It has been stated that greed is the source of all evil, and people who constantly are on social media are the exact reasons for that statement. As stated in the article The Effects of Social Media on How we Speak and Write, “Where speakers once saw the eyes of their listeners” they can only see the bright screens from either their phones or computers, in which they are “typing notes or tweeting updates throughout the presentation.”, which basically is stating how instead of actually participating in any sort of lesson, students are just using social media. Of course, the students on their devices during school hours use more random jargon for their posts, and the whole thing becomes a convoluted mess of odd words and phrases that have been completely jumbled into some monstrosity that we deem as an acceptable sentence. I of course believe this because I walk through the hallways at school and hear many slang terms and abbreviations in their speech and it makes me want to cringe.

Social Media serves as a distraction to humans, and it causes us to lose out on many intellectually stimulating conversations with real people, and it turns them into mindless banter. We gradually lose our interest in having face-to-face connections and instead we turn to our devices to talk using silly emoticons or abbreviations, which in turn makes our whole entire thought about conversation completely lose its meaning and become something totally ridiculous. “Though we’re no less social, we are more distracted.”, so much so that it “takes a real effort” to even consider placing our devices down. A quote from social media today from the article The Effects of Social Media on How we Speak and Write. Due to our obsession over smartphones and social media, we are easily distracted from reality and lose our touch in conversations, causing our conversations with others to be tedious with either one or both sides going onto their phones and ceasing the conversation. In the article Twitter: Subverting the English language?, the author states that “Teachers are noticing more punctuation errors (especially apostrophe errors), spelling mistakes, and inconsistent capitalization usually found only in text messages and Twitter posts. More students are failing English exams due to a lack of basic grammar skills.”. Basically, this shows how degraded our language has become and how it is affecting our pieces of writing. Many of the youth nowadays have the devices that are required to use the many kinds of social media out there, from things like snapchat, to twitter, or even far off things like steam. A huge percentage of modern teenagers are on social media, and it clearly has been shown because teenagers are constantly distracted on their phones during classes and typical conversations.

There are others out there who might argue that the fact that we are on social media constantly bolsters our ability to communicate with others. They say that Social Media connects people from around the world, and even allows them to meet up with those who have similar personalities, when they normally would never have any chance to meet at all. Some might actually believe this because of those who work for the companies that run the sites paying people to endorse their social media devices. Of course though, social media may do those things, but instead of having positive consequences, the results are actually much more negative. Instead of allowing people to express themselves online and become more social, it actually isolates them from the rest of the world, because all they are doing is presenting a false image online so people would believe that they are what they say on the internet instead of how they are in reality. The point about meeting people from across the world is also false, because most people tend to stay with their friend groups when they go onto any kind of social media, and are usually distrustful of other people.

In conclusion, social media has been a major disruptor in our modern way of communicating, and it should probably be regulated and used less by students. It has only caused problems in our society as a whole, and our way of communication with others is the very victim of it. We need to put down our phones and computers, and go get into real conversations with people, otherwise our language will degrade immensely from all of the slang and random acronyms being deemed as regular speech. We will delve so far into our phones that we might end up marrying them. There needs to be someone or something out there to make social media less addictive and less appealing to minors. Schools have already started blocking social media sites, and now there are harsh policies for getting on your phone in class. We teenagers should get the message and stop using so many social media sites, because they clog up our free time, and our free will.