Anti-Social Networks

As I was reading the first chapter in “Communications and Cyberspace,” particularly page 35, I started to think about the effect that new media, including social networks, have on our social lives. In one particular passage Gumpert and Drucker talk about the way social life used to be, and how they “played and watched others play,” and “conversed with strangers we might not meet again…” This passage really made me think about how much the average human social life has changed due to new technology. Nowadays a good amount of social interactions happen online, whereas in former generations there was no such think as online interactions. It appears as though we are becoming more antisocial, sitting in front of a computer screen talking to people via web rather than going out and actually seeing that person or doing some sort of activity with them. Many people’s social lives seem to have been consumed by facebook, even though facebook is supposed to be a way to enhance our social lives, not hinder it. In addition to social networking sites causing a decrease in face-to-face interactions, another media that does the same thing is video games. It looks as if many kids are now spending a lot of time indoors playing video games rather than going outside and participating in sports or other activities with other people. New media does have many tools that make it easier to interact with other, but we have to be careful to make sure we don’t use it as the only way of interaction.