Technology and Social Isolation

Technology and Social Isolation

Justin Tomkins

DeVry University

Technology and Social Isolation

Section I.

Let’s say you are sitting on your computer playing the newest game with a few people you met through the game and your buddies call to invite you to a party, yet for some reason you turn them down so you can keep playing this game with your “new” friends. This scenario is happening more and more every day and our families are suffering the consequences. Technology has put a noose around the neck of current social standards and is slowly choking out personal interaction and tearing families apart. The purpose of this paper is to show the effects that technology has on our social views by explaining the dangers of social media, the devastation that addiction to games is causing to families, emotional detachment from others, and the impact that technology has on our everyday lives.

Social media has become the new way for many people around the world to communicate with new people each day. The only problem with this is there is no emotion that can be conveyed. Conversations become very machine-like even with the little acronyms like “Lol” to make you believe that the person is literally laughing themselves to tears, which rarely happens over an Internet conversation. Out of your Facebook friends how many are actually your friends that you have spent some time with in person? Hopefully more than three quarters, but you still have a few that are just people that Facebook recommended to you and you haven’t actually met. Ethan Huff had a piece about social media in which a woman posted her suicide letter to Facebook and not a single so-called friend questioned the legitimacy of the post (Huff, 2011). Is this the kind of friends you want in your life? I hope not, because the friends made online have no connection with you outside of social media.

Next we come to a subject that we are all guilty of in some way. Sometimes we think that surfing the Internet...