Human Interaction in the digital era

Human interaction in the social media and digital age that we are now in has changed a lot even since I was a young kid. I remember growing up, and lucky for me I had neighbors who had children roughly my age, we would go outside and do stuff every day. Whether that was riding bikes, playing sports, or terrorizing our neighbors by ringing their doorbells and running away, we were always outside playing together and interacting. Now it seems that kids, even myself, spend most of their interaction on video games or social media. With the ongoing pandemic, face-to-face interaction has become difficult, and sometimes not possible. Your main way of communicating is through some online medium. This has and will take a toll on people’s social skills. I remember when I first got out of quarantine last spring after the shut down, it was a bit weird seeing people and actually having to look presentable going out and talking to people. I think it will take a while for people’s social skills to recover, and hopefully people are realizing how precious social interaction is, and maybe step away from the phones and computers and be with real people.

We can use the internet to serve our needs or for the greater good of humanity in many ways. One that I think is amazing is what we talked about the other week. Online activism is a great way to utilize the internet for good reasons. Some of the movements people were able to start just by using hashtags or people sharing post is amazing. One of my classmates wrote about it the other week in her media post talking about sexual assault activism. Something that may not be super comfortable to talk about in person, but you can create quite the uproar through social media and spark real change.