Consequences of becoming an online society
The internet has revolutionized the world through the increased advancement of the technology. Currently, the network society is as a result of the digital revolution in collaboration with core socio-cultural changes. The internet therefore makes up the technological infrastructure of the world wide network society. Various social networks have been set up with an aim of uniting the people through the internet. There are both negative as well as positive impacts that are contributed by the social networks that form the online society. Though social networking is a tool that is used across the world by the majority in promoting and supporting communication, it s doing more harm than it is doing good and hence the consequences outweighs the benefits f this online society. This paper, therefore, will present and discuss some of the various consequences that are attributed to the online society.
Globally much of the time is spent in the internet as most of the people prefer to use the internet as a platform for all kinds of activities whether it terms of business, individual or social activities. Thus the physical life is diminishing as the virtual life is increasingly becoming the social life. Traditional interactions in the society are reducing as most of the people are communicating using the social media platforms. This has resulted to isolation of the people within the society as there is no physical touch as the people interacts face to face as in the traditional society. The online society therefore has reduced the friendship level within the society and thus the traditional personal interaction is fading away. This has led to the slow loss of the human interaction as most of the people find it easy to converse through the internet. This will therefore lead into the degrading of our language skills and the skills of public speaking. Thus in cases of social gatherings normal debates, public confrontation and speaking will be a hard task to carry out as people will not be able to learn each other’s body language (Debatin et al 84). This is not right in our society, this is because of the fact that humans are social beings and hence they should regularly engage in personal interactions with other members of the society especially the physical society and not the online society s as to be able to realize the significance of socializing as well as leading balanced lives. Emotionally we are getting detached from the reality as we are focusing more on the less meaningful relationships. Thus the emotional touch that people usually offer people of closer relationship especially when the friends are in need is lacking in the online society (Iachello & Hong 100). Thus most of the online society members barely know their circle of friends and thus they end up building up a false sense of friendship connection and they are only limited by sending mails or even commenting on the social network platforms. Trust in this case is hard to be built in this setting and thus most of the people end up suffering from loneliness as they have no trust on these false relationships. Thus casual relationships formed in the online society are not helpful at all especially in times when people have to stand with each other.
The society we are living is not safe at all following the increased use of the social networking. Privacy issue has raised concern among the online society as these social networking platforms inspires people to be more publicized than to be private. Thus users are fond of using their personal lives while posting and even while signing in and creating accounts in these social networks platforms. These personal details thus remains indefinitely available and thus making the online society vulnerable to insecurity issues. Terrorism attacks are also organized using these online societies and these terrorists may gather information about the whereabouts and the family details about a person of interest. Also the kidnappers and frauds use these social media platforms so as to gather information about people and they use it against them for manipulation and theft (Jagatic et al 5).
It is important to note that although most of the people across the world are users of the social network and that they belong to the online society; this online social network should only be used as a tool. In this case, communication on long distances will be enhanced greatly though it should not entirely form the basis of our communication as well as interaction in the society. Though the world is changing us, we should all thrive to preserve our physical interaction as it is important in human lives than the virtual life through internet connection. Thus it is important to realize that the positive benefits that we all get from these online societies are not much as compared to the negative impacts of this internet. Thus, if we constantly overuse these social networks then we will continually impact our communication skills, self expression qualities, bullying, destroy or weaken friendships and in entirety we will have negatively affected the whole humanity.
References
Debatin, Bernhard, et al. "Facebook and online privacy: Attitudes, behaviors, and unintended consequences." Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 15.1 (2009): 83-108.
Iachello, G. & Hong, J. End-user privacy in human–computer interaction. Foundations and Trends in Human–Computer Interaction, 2007. 1(1), 1–137.
Jagatic, T., Johnson, N., Jakobsson, M., & Menczer, F. Social phishing. December 12, 2005, Indiana University, Bloomington.
