Face-to-face Conversations or Social Media
With the technological progress, people can easily get the access to communicate with each other anytime and anywhere. Technology brings us a new form of communication, and social media turns out to be the mainstream. Despite the convenience of social media, there still are a great number of people advocating the importance of face-to-face conversation and concerning the hazard of social media. However, social media has already been rooted in our lives and become an inseparable part of modern society. Then the question of whether social media really endangers humans remains a controversial dispute. Since we are constantly involved in either face-to-face conversations or via social media, and some differences and similarities can be easily compared.
Relationships Development:
First of all, face-to-face conversations and social media are distinct on expanding relationships. It’s obvious that one can quickly build up the relationship with the others through social media. No matter what social media is, such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and so on, you can easily get a lengthy list of friends by a simple click. Whereas a traditional face-to-face conversation needs
a gradual and slow process to develop a
relationship from knowing a person to
being familiar with him or her. Although
people can get a throng of “friends” by
social media readily, these so-called friend
relationships are not as firm and loyal
as the relationships based on the
long-term communications by
face-to-face conversations. Therefore,
people usually use social media to contact
their old friends and fellows rather than
making friends with others. Since the
popularization of the Internet, social media
become a powerful tool to keep in touch with those friends or even to regain contact with the disconnected friends.
Privacy:
However, the convenience of social media also brings us another problem about privacy. Although we can find our friends on these platforms, at the same time, our personal information is exposed to the public. The exposure of our privacy provides clues and accesses for human flesh searching. Strangers can get to know our basic information, jobs, families, daily lives, and so forth effortlessly. Conversely, as for face-to-face conversation, it can possess a guarantee of privacy to a certain extent. The content of conversation is kept between the involved people. Without other electronic devices, the content will be conserved by humans’ brains only. Only if the participants tell the third person, except for the related people, there will not be anyone else knowing the content of conversation.
Preserving Records:
Nevertheless, having the security of privacy means that the sole records of face-to-face conversations are our memories. Additionally, memories of ordinary humans are unreliable and subjective. Also, people
can’t help but forget things. We can’t
recall the content of the conversation
that precisely while social media can do
this. The words written on the social
media will be taken down clearly by the
strong database of the Internet. When we
forget the details of the words we
wrote on the social media, we can
retrace back the records and have a
check. These records last forever, and you don’t have to worry that they will be gone someday as long as you can take the risk that your privacy may be unveiled to the public.
Contact with Distant Friends:
Besides preserving the records of our words well, social media helps us a lot to contact relatives and friends far away from us. We no longer have to be concerned about losing contact with our overseas
friends. We don’t need to waste a huge
amount of time on writing letters back
and forth. Moreover, we can chat with
our friends anywhere and anytime as
to have a face-to-face conversation must
meet each other in person. As a result,
the distance will be a crucial problem
for a face-to-face conversation. We have
to make an appointment with our friends
to check the meeting location and time. On this point, face-to-face conversation wastes more time and is less convenient than social
media.
Information Processing :
On top of that, social media allows people to have time to process the information. With social media, we can choose when to read the messages or information sent by the others and even filter out unnecessary information. Before we reply those messages, we can
reconsider our wordings and
arrange our thoughts with
sufficient time to answer the
person properly. On the
contrary, a face-to-face
conversation asks people to
make a response on the spot.
During a face-to-face
conversation, we don’t have
much time to process the information, and we tend to reply or react spontaneously as soon as we receive the information. Because we can’t choose whether we want to receive or reply instantly; consequently, people may have inappropriate responses to another person from time to time.
Characteristic of Anonymous :
Despite the merit of being able to choose our wordings on social media, there are still a lot of people taking advantage of anonymous quality of social media and leaving vicious comments on the others. Anonymous characteristics encourage the rise of cyberbully, and people can express their opinions outrageously. Because those haters and the other netizens are
not directly in touch with the
person being criticized, they will
be indifferent toward the
person’s emotions and feelings.
In contrast to the anonymous
system of social media,
face-to-face conversations can
directly communicate with each
other, and people can feel the
subtle emotion changes from
the facial expression or intonation. That is to say that these nonverbal interactions convey more information than mere texts from social media do. Although social media tries to utilize emoji to make up for this drawback, emoji still can’t completely replace nonverbal interactions. Furthermore, talking with each other face-to-face also enforces people to receive the prompt reactions from the opposite and to care his or her emotions. Under face-to-face conversation, people usually won’t say something nasty to provoke someone deliberately.
From the above, we realize various perspectives of social media and face-to-face conversations, including relationship development, privacy, preserving records, contact with distant friends, information processing, and characteristic of anonymous. Surely, social media can
bring us a more convenient life.
Concurrently, they may carry some
potential risks or disadvantages, as
for face-to-face conversations, vice
versa. Things always have one body
and two sides. Therefore, it is
important to balance between social
media and face-to-face conversations. We can enjoy the convenience of social media but don’t overly rely on it. After all, the relationship constructed by the face-to-face conversations tend to be firmer and sincere.
Reference
Daily Headline. (2019). “The art of communication”— At the age of social media, how to communicate in a safer and more effective way? Retrieved from https://kknews.cc/zh-tw/tech/x6lx648.html
TEDx Talks. (2014). The most-social media is face to face: Stacey Irwin at TEDxLancaster. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=UNGvhO8XNrE&feature=emb_title
BBC. (2018). Is social media harmful? Where is the proofs and mysteries? Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/ukchina/trad/vert-fut-42748944