From Computer Screens To The Real World

by Anna Grafilo

Social networks changed the way we communicate with other people these days. It became easier for us to talk with our friends and relatives through instant messengers like Skype and Facebook messenger and e-mails. The purpose of these technologies is primarily to bring people who cannot be physically near you closer by allowing us to have a faster way to communicate with them. Some people say that social network is one of the things that caused this world to be fragmented. They say that the technology that was supposed to bring people closer also is one of the reasons why our society becomes more and more fragmented. An example of how social networks show how fragmented we are, are in the photos itself. Humans are social beings and it reflects on some older photographs where most of them feature a family or a group of friends but we can see a shift that from family and friends the photos that we take are slowly becoming centered with ourselves. In one Facebook account we could see that the owner has may be hundreds of thousand of photos with them but there is also sometimes one album besides the profile pictures album containing their 'selfies'. Selfies are basically pictures of only yourself and no one else.

But it is not with the pictures that we see how social networks are instruments or further fragmenting the world we live in. We could see it also by the way we interact with each other. Sometimes I would see people in the cafeteria sitting across each other but their attention is not with the person they are with it is with the person on the phone or sometimes they are with the person physically but the attention is not there it is with their phones or laptops playing games or another person they are talking to. For me it is rude because you are together supposedly to spend time and interact with each other but what happens was that they are there physically but not mentally.

People say that because of social networks our interactions with other people becomes more and more distant, in a way we prefer to talk to them facing the screen than talk to them face to face because it is more comfortable. We have thousands of friends in Facebook but we do not know all of them personally. But is it really the social networks are not really the ones to blame for the further fragmentation of the world, we are the ones to blame. Going back to the purpose of social networks it was created by the people who wanted it to be an instrument to connect people all over the world to bring our loved ones closer. It is us that give these technologies a purely selfish purpose and then blame them for the growing distance among us mentally and emotionally.


I think that the world that was broken years before us and our own broken world are the same. The world during 1950’s are the same as 2013’s people go on with their lives without a care for what other people do and what they are experiencing. But we can still try to repair this broken world. It may not fully heal but we can still try by doing simple things like greeting other people or like trying to relate to other people and not just the class you belong in by getting ourselves to be more exposed to the reality that not all of us have it easy. Maybe the world will never fully heal from its fragmentation but maybe just maybe we try to reach out and give an effort to heal it.