Final Blog

The internet has changed the world of mass communication by establishing a connection to every person in the world.  The internet has made it super easy to communicate with anyone in the world.  A good example of this is that my friend is a student at the University of Delaware and for his anthropology class he had to get in contact with someone from Europe and ask them different questions about their culture.  He ended up dm'ing a guy from Italy and he ended up getting in contact with him and got all the information necessary to complete his assignment. The internet has also made it so easy to get and share information.  Nowadays people get notifications sent to their phones from different media outlets that give you fast and up to date news about whats going on in the world.  From world news, pop culture, sports and so on, with access to the internet you can receive news about whatever you want whenever it's first announced. Now despite these things some people would say that the internet has hurt how we socialize to one another in person.  Some people believe that the internet cannot take the place of true face to face interaction and it seems that no matter how much people interact online, it doesn't help people when it comes to finding true human interactions that they desire.  Also the internet can be a very addictive place and being on it too much can be detrimental.  According to a study done at the Stockholm School of Economics,

people who spend a lot of time online tend to score lower on scales of emotional intelligence and social skills.  The people who spend the most time online are young kids and the issue with this is that young people are the ones that need to learn how to interact with people the most.  Intuitively, it does make sense: if people are having a hard time communicating with other people, they are going to be less likely to participate in social interaction.  Instead these people are going to spend their time alone scrolling through social media and chatting with people online.  People that do this though have a very low chance to improve their communication skills.  They've entered a downhill slide, where they spend hours a day online and become more and more lonesome, and never feel comfortable communicating with others.  It's very important that every now and then we shut off our phones and just interact with the people around us in order to avoid this destructive downward spiral.  Human beings crave social interaction and without it people get very lonely and depressed.  At the end of the day, human beings are social animals that need interaction with others to survive.  It's very important to remember this now more than ever since we are now living in a world that is spending more and more time online. We need to limit our time on the internet and just interact with each other because although it's great connecting with people online, there's nothing better than connecting with people face to face.