Table of Contents
Introduction
The world communication technologies have witnessed a unprecedented development while the new-emerged online communication methods has changed the methods people use to communicate. Though people come from different age group, educational background and geological regions tend to have different attitudes towards online communication. The general descend is clear, that is the online communication are playing a vital role in modern people’s social life.
Though there are some people hold negative attitude towards online communication. The life without social media is unimaginative. This essay will show the dual character of online communication will be analyzed and I will explain why the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Improving Working Efficiency
To begin with, one of the advantages that online communication makes human life easily and colourful. Thanks to the advanced communication technologies, people nowadays could use mobile phones or laptops to contact with their family and friends regardless their distance. It is important for people, especially for students, to stay connected with others.
For example, last week I had to do a group project, but my partners could not came to my home. We decide to use Wechat and Soho to exchange our viewpoints and write the report together. Without Wechat and Soho, we could not finished our project before the deadline. As a result, social communicating medias are useful and beneficial for people since they always need to keep connection with their friends and partners.
People could also save a lot of time and money by using telecommuting. Since telecommuting enables people work at anywhere even at home, they do not need to spent minutes or hours go to the offices and pay for the commuting fee.
This means people will get more leisure time to relax and more money to spend. Telecommuting could increase people’s working efficiency. Working form home could help people to concentrate on their work without the distraction of office events and coworkers. Besides, using online social media could also improve people’s communicative skills.
Improving Communicative Skills
Moreover, by using the online social media, people’s communicative skills tend to be improved, both online and real life. People have more time to think how to response other people appropriately when they use social software. This is helpful for introverted people who fell nervous when talk with others but want to practise their social communicative skills.
With social communicative medias, individuals tend to have opportunities to learn how to talk with others and become more outgoing. Take myself as an example, I used to be a shy person. I need long time to organized my sentence and think how to response others. However, when I use Wechat to talk with others, I can respond rapidly and feel more comfortable.
Gradually, I gain confidence and know how to response others quickly and correctly. I feel no more nervous and become outgoing. Online social media also give people with disability an platform to express their ideas and help to enforce their connection with society. People who have disability tend to have limit chance to socialize in the “offline” world . However, online social media enable all people to exchange their ideas on the same platform equally, regardless of their gender, body condition and body health.
Online communicative medias help them to making friends and stand for their right anonymously. Those people with special body condition will become confident and enlarge their social cycles by using online social medias, which tend to give them courage to overcome the illness and help them to keep friendship and participant in real life. Social networking is not only useful for people with physical disability, but also help people to prevent mental illness.
Release People’s Mental Stress
Furthermore, people who use video chat functions like Skype and FaceTime tend to have relative low possibility to get depressive symptoms compared with those people who did not use any social medias. This statement is a result of a new study conducted by researchers at OHSU. Those researchers found that people who use video chat to connect with their friends have the least possibility to get depression among seniors.
In this research, 1,424 participants who completed a series of investigation about the usage of technologies at 2012 were identified. Those participants also responded to a follow-up investigation two years later, which measure their depressive symptoms. The results shows that people who use video chat application such as Skype and Facetime had almost half of probability of mental diseases.
As a result, the connection between use of social media and prevention of mental diseases such as depression should not be ignored. Video chat engages user to have a nearly face to face communication via Internet, thus giving people a sense of accompany.
Face to face communication tend to release people’s mental stress, especially for those old people who feel lonely frequently. Online Video chat allows people to see the ‘real’ friends or family members in front of them, which will give them a sense of home and well-being.
The Potential Danger of Online Communication
Admittedly, some people have hold negative attitude towards online communicative medias because of the prevalence of cyber-violence. Since the Internet become more and more popular, more and more people can easily access to Internet and social media. Cyber-violence, especially against women and girls is an concern, affects the lives of victims numerously.
However, even the statistic of lifetime cyber bullying Victimization Rates shows that the percent of people experienced bullying is increasing, the damaging extent that bullying bring to people is decreasing. Most of Internet users know how to react the bullying action and they know how to protect their privacy and personal security. Therefore, even the phenomenon of cyber-bullying could not be eliminated, its damage is alleviate.
All in all, the advanced online social medias are making people’s life more convenience and comfortable. Since it gives people access to socialize and even keep people away from mental diseases.