Monday, September 17, 2012

How sociable are the people logged into the social networking sites?


This is a question often I ask myself that how sociable are the people logged into the social networking sites? Our life is confined into the virtual world and most of our time is spend in the virtual world. It is considered that if we don’t have an account in any of the social networking sites we don’t exist at all because cyber space is said to be the most happening place than the real world that is out there in front of us and we are so fascinated with the virtual world and the sort of publicity it can offer us.


The social networking sites got such a big hype and their reach to the people were phenomenal. Now it is the matter of status having multiple accounts in the social networking sites and having maximum number of friends in the friend list. In order to have a long list of friends we keep adding people who even not fall in our friend circle. The question remains how many of us really know all our Facebook friends?

Have the social networking sites enabled us to be more social in actuality? How far we have become sociable since the advent and frequent access to the social networking sites? Advent of internet and lofty influence of social networking have resulted in the new phenomenon of internet chatting thus, it has created a new set of people who are called webtrovert. We are familiar with the words introvert and extrovert but the word webtrovert is perhaps new to us.

Now the question is who is webtrovert then? Webtrovert is the person who makes friendships in online sphere and engages in online chatting but when this particular person meets his friends face to face he would be shy and would be an introvert, not talking with anyone at all. So in online we don’t mind chatting with people whom we don’t know really but when they come face to face they are entirely strangers to us.     

This kind of person is extrovert in the online sphere but in real life they are introvert. They can only communicate with people only with the medium of internet not any real face to face talk. People who chat in online for hours and hours would be totally strangers when they come face to face. These people always need the technological aid for their communication, without technology they loose their confidence and perhaps they can’t talk to people at all.

We are very dynamic in social networking sites; in terms of updating our status, writing in our walls, putting up thoughts, uploading snaps of anything and everything we do, hitting likes, making comments and chatting with friends. But all these are limited only to the virtual world. 

Therefore, the social networking sites have not made us sociable. The social networking sites, which in fact help people to remain connected with their friends and have to make people extrovert are taking a U-turn. The new way of chatting should help people to become extrovert from being introvert but at the end of day the social networking sites do not make us outgoing instead we are confined to the glamour and publicity that social networking sites can offer. 

1 comment:

  1. Social networking sites do help break the ice for introverts, but we need better ways to make meeting people face-to-face fun and simple. With social media becoming chaotic and cluttered, people are struggling to find value from them. I see more people going out to connect with real people within their community instead of spending time networking online. Tech still has a role to play in face-to-face meetings (see meetup.com, Evernote Hello and Napkkin).

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