Social media made families closer or not?

            Nowadays, most people use Social media for everything. Not only for communication but also for working, studying, sharing and many more. Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks.  In fact, some people think social media can make them addicted. However, social media can give some advantages, such as can make us closer with others. One-third (33%) of online adults say that the social media has improved their connections with friends “a lot,” and nearly one-quarter (23%) say that it has greatly improved their connections with members of their family (Pew Internet and American Life Project Networked Family Survey, 2008. Therefore, we should use social media to get those advantages.

            Social media can make families closer each other because social media is used for communication. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported about 47% of 2,252 respondents said that such technologies are increasing the quality of communications within households, and 53% said they are bolstering the quality of communications among family members living apart (2008). In addition, the study found that in 70% of couples who use social media, people contact each other at least once a day just to say hello or chat, compared to 54% of couples with social media or not. On the others, 12% of parents contact their children daily using social media.

            In this era, if we do not use social media, we find some difficulties to connect with others. It is because online communication also have the potential to increase our awareness of the movements of our professional or social contacts. Twitter, for instance, offers us an update of things people we know happen to be doing at a particular point of time. This phenomenon has been referred as social proprioception by Clive Thompson (2007), “after the physical quality of proprioception that tells a creature where its extremities are by the reception of stimuli produced within the organism. Social proprioception tells us where the nodes of our community are and provides a sense of connectedness to and awareness of others without direct communication. Internet is the third place where people connect with friends, build a sense of togetherness.”

            Some people may say that media social is used as a place for bullying people. However, it is absolutely nonsenses. In social media, we can share our hobby or interest, such as photography. For example, we use Facebook as a media for sharing our photos. The others can give comments to our photos and we can share where the photo have been taken, how to take picture with hand phone or camera correctly or anything else about photography. The data of Sum All (2013), about 15% Facebook users access Facebook to accommodate their hobbies.

            In brief, social media is becoming an integral part of life online as social websites. Most traditional online media include social components, include social component for users. It has function to connect sharing opinion or creativity. For example, Facebook or Twitter. Those become the platform forms or sites that focus on facilitating relation among people. Social media has some advantages, such as communication with families and sharing hobbies. We should use social media wisely to get those advantages.

References:

Pew Internet and American Life Project Networked Family Survey

(http://www.pewinternet.org/2008/10/19/the-internet-cell-phones-and-family-communication/)

(http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/)

https://sumall.com/

Baruah, T. D. 2012. Effectiveness of Social Media as a tool of communication and its potential for technology enabled connections: A micro-level study, (Online), (http://www.ijsrp.org) it is searched May 10, 2015

By: Agung Bimo Baskoro

Academic Toulmin Argumentative