Social Media is a Distraction From the Real World

In the world of today, we are invariably looking down on our phones, almost on the diurnal. We are becoming imperceptive from the world in front of us. Echo Staff’s article states, “social networking creates distraction, nuisance among students.” The article also mentions 68 percent of American students own smartphones. Moreover, whenever we are in need of an answer to something, the first place we go to is our phones.

It is astonishing how the creation of Internet has changed people’s lives. It allocates communication and accessibility at all times with just one click. What makes the media an efficient resource is that it is reachable at any time. However, sometimes we tend to misuse and abuse the privilege that is given to us.

Students are constantly checking their statuses online, wherever they are. In class, or at home, they’re always on their laptops or smartphones passing time checking their “home page” and disregard the lecture that the teacher is giving. In the Time Magazine (US Edition) and article called Wired for Distraction: Kids and Social Media, written by Dalton Conley, states, “Students and people that are heavily involved in social media have continuous partial attention.” This means that most people have an inability to concentrate on people or things around them; they will always be involved in another action, which may be on their phones.

You might be wondering how social media helps when you need the answer to a homework question or how it ruins our society. Well as you can see, children are the future generation. Giving them the easy way out as a child will be no help to them in the future. They will believe that everything in life will be as easy as finding the answers online. If you think about it, every subject or topic answer is somewhere on the Internet. People have the ability to just pull it up on their phones and copy the information down. The problem with this is that we are not learning anything from copying our answers from someone else that happened to post it online for the rest of us. Looking from a future perspective, if a student wanted to become an engineer, that career requires math. However if the students had looked up every topic in math instead of taking the time to learn it themselves, they wouldn’t know how to do the calculations. Just like that, the opportunity to do something that they’ve always wanted will slip from their hands.

In conclusion, how we choose to use social media will have a large affect on how life will be for us in the years to come. If we let all the technology we have keep us from paying attention to things that are important in life, it will mess up our chances and possibly our dreams.

Conley, Dalton. "Wired for Distraction: Kids and Social Media." Time. Time Inc., 2011. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.

"Social Networking Creates Distractions, Nuisance among Students." The Echo. 2014. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.