Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Yik Yak. All different forms of social media prevalent across college campuses nationwide. These apps allow students to share thoughts and feelings through words and pictures and, of course, communicate with one another. But is being pulled in all these different directions really the best thing for us? Or because of stretching ourselves so thin, are we actually damaging our college experience?
We walk back and forth to classes with our eyes glued to the screen, our fingers busy texting, "liking," and "sharing" what we see. Rarely do you see two people happily acknowledge each other in passing or stop with a stranger to have a great conversation. I know I’ve been guilty of the former, but I also participate in the latter. Our phones and tablets are wonderful devices, but I can’t help but notice that people are wanting more from these devices than what they are capable of.
I’ve seen on Yik Yak recently all different yaks that basically say a person wants to meet more people but either doesn’t know how or is too afraid of it not working out to try. Being painfully shy or nervous is completely understandable, but I promise a vast majority of us would love to have a conversation and become friends! College is a time to go out and be friends with people who are both like you and completely different than you in order to create the best relationships possible. And quite frankly, I think it’s sad that our generation is growing up too attached to these devices to look up from the screen and talk face-to-face.
Social media and technology are great ways of beginning a dialogue with people who you know of or would like to know (just don’t forget that there are people who aren’t honest on these sites, too!), but what happens when you meet in person? If we keep pushing away our interpersonal communication, the world will default to only speaking through these other mediums, forcing us to live in multiple realities at once. We will have to be fully present in the reality of social media, texting, our own trains of thought, and our physical reality outside of the technologies at the same time. It seems pretty impossible and much more difficult than it has to be!
We all want our college experience to be memorable, right? So why not go out and make it memorable? As scary as it may seem sometimes just starting a conversation with a “hey” or even a complement will create a strong bond of friendship. Meeting new people, involving yourself in different groups on campus, and looking up from our screens every once in a while makes an indescribable difference in what we get out of our college experience. Going out and actively communicating with others will not only benefit ourselves and our confidence to speak to others, but it will ultimately make some of the best memories. There are times and places that we can visit in so much detail and vividness not because of the screen we see in front of us, but because of the sights, smells and communication we have participated in and overheard. So, as true as it is that we all have memories that we wish we could just scroll back to, would we constantly want to live vicariously through our technology?
