We use social media as if we own it. Of course, all of us acknowledge the fact that it has changed our lives in many ways but we don’t realise that it has made us lonelier than ever before. Posting pictures of what you ate and drank last weekend to show the world yes, I enjoyed, seems like a trend going on for all age groups. I do this all the time and in fact, Facebook is like my second home. What we are not realising is that the moment of joy with our loved ones is getting lost day by day.
Family dinners or gossip sessions with sisters are getting replaced with the habit of posting status updates every second of the day. Social media has taken over our lives in such a way that now as I sit in my room with my sister, silence overtakes and it is not because of a fight but because she is busy with what she calls her “life”. No matter how hard I try to converse and tell her about a new exciting movie coming up, it eventually ends up with a tablet in her hands as she says, “Yes, I’m listening.”
Is social media stronger than our relationships? Are we so consumed by it that if it was taken away from us, we can say it would be a matter of life and death? It saddens me that my generation and the coming generations are losing their path to something so dark and lonely. Trying to overcome this epidemic seems impossible, which is sad because in the meantime, we are losing personal touch. Communication is not necessarily just about expressing ourselves or listening to others, rather about feeling the emotions of the person, and that is something that social media has taken away from us.
- The reader is a Pakistani student based in Sharjah.
