Don’t you love it when you are about to have the biggest game or performance of your life and you get a good luck text from your best friend or boyfriend/girlfriend? That’s one of the many advantages texting has. I remember when my team and I was walking into the venue where we would be competing in just 3 hours, we were all so nervous and scared. I got a text from my best friend that was extremely encouraging and instantly my nerves went away, I was ready to compete at Nationals. Social media has definitely helped the improvement of our ability to communicate with each other over time, it gives us a way to communicate with people on the other side of the world just like they are standing right in front of you.

There are multiple different types of social media but the most used social media type is facebook. According to I knew you before I met you, “about 7.1 billion people on the planet right now. Of those billions, more than 1 billion have facebook accounts, including 67% of people in the U.S.” this explains just how connected we are to everyone through social media. Almost all of the social media’s have direct messaging, DMing is exactly like texting so you can easily talk to someone that’s halfway across the world just as easy as if they were standing right next to you. One of my best friends moved to Texas last year and because of social medias like snapchat, I can talk to him on a daily basis. We’re definitely not as close, but at least we can stay in touch!

Twitter has helped the spread of information so much and it can also help people learn how to consolidate their point into 140 characters. It is very fast and that’s because when you use twitter, not only will your followers see your tweet. One of your followers can retweet it and then all of their followers will see your tweet too. Information can spread so fast because the more people that retweet it, the more people see it. “’If you use twitter correctly,’ Lay explained, ‘you can get quite a lot of conversation going, as opposed to one person sucking all the air out of the room with their rambling’” Why can’t Johnny write? Don’t blame social media. This tells us that this type of social media can be used as a two way conversation with one another. It also can help with literature too because we have to fit what we want to say (which could be like a paragraph) into 140 characters while still getting our point across and that can get challenging sometimes.

Twitter can also be used to spark emotions that sometimes can’t be sparked by just face to face conversations. Texting can be used as a way to flirt with people. Some people can’t flirt with people in person so they go on social media or they start texting the person they like, “Texting can spark some emotions that texting can’t”-Connected but alone. It gives them the feeling of being safe and protected by hiding behind their phone or computer screen. 

People might say that it is easy to misread messages and yes, it is possible to misread things and think that they said something that they didn’t. That happens when you have face to face conversations too. Also, one way you can stop sending messages that people might misread is emoji’s! Most phones today have emoticons that help show emotion and objects! So you can be telling a joke and then you send a wink emoji and boom, all your problems are solved.

In conclusion, I believe that social media has in fact helped our community to communicate rather than destroyed the communication. With the help of social media, we can communicate with people around the world easily, texting can help spark emotions/flirt, and social medias like twitter can spread information faster than any other source. Many people think social media has hurt us, I am here to prove that it hasn’t.