Face-to-face Conversations or Social Media
While you are sitting on the toilet relieving yourself, the idea of texting back home just suddenly comes to your mind. So you take out the cell phone almost subconsciously from the pocket, swiftly type words, send it out, and thus successfully inform your aliveness to parents with few words or even only a sticker with your butt is still laid bare. After that, you prepare to meet the professor in person at the office for some questions. You know it is quite inappropriate to discuss questions with professor through Facebook. Besides being face-to-face, the traditional way of communication, with the advanced development of technology, modern people now have the other option, which is just an application installed in a small digital device－your smart phone. Face-to-face communication and social media are both for exchanging information, they indeed have many differences, and people normally choose what they need for communication according to their discourse contents and purposes.
One of the drawbacks that occurs more often with social media than face-to-face
communication is misunderstanding. Since social media is created for convenience, the
discourse strategy people use on it tends to be quick and concise, hoping to use minimal
word count to express maximal ideas, and thus usually omitting details. Most of social
media users have ever encountered an awkward situation that they has to guess the real
meaning of his online friend’s message from only a few cold words without any emotional signal or vivid sticker that can show the friend’s emotion and tone. Due to the high possibility to cause unnecessary dispute or misunderstanding, people normally will choose not to have serious discussions involved complex questions through social media. On the other hand, face-to-face communication naturally avoids this embarrassing moment because communicators can see each other’s facial expression and hear the tone to distinguish: Is he joking? Is he making sarcasm? In face-to-face communication, it is less possible to cause misunderstanding.
Another disadvantage of social media is the lack of physical interaction. Angela Ahrendts, the senior vice president of retail at Apple. Inc., once said “I don’t care how advanced technology gets. I don’t think that there’s anything that can replace looking someone in the eyes, touching their hand, you know?” Body language actually consists in a huge part of human communication, and hundreds of stickers online can never replace sincere eyes or a friendly smile which have the magic of boosting the language power. By expressing profound feelings that are mutually related among people, the persuasiveness of discourse content raises to another level, and that is probably the reason why we close annoying web ads without any hesitation but not have the heart to reject those impoverished guys sending ads on the road. What’s more, we also can see many admired speakers on TED catching the audience’s eyes not only by the brilliant content but by the rich and vivid facial expression and body language. The importance of physical interaction in face-to-face communication can’t be overemphasized more.
However, there are still many advantages of social media; for example, it saves time. With only few words, we can finish ordering meals or making appointments. We don’t have to
consider the condition of time, money or place while using social media, and these
beneficial traits hugely reduces our implicit cost on exchanging information. For
instance, you can contact your parents; however, you may spend time going to the
professor’s office for the discussion. Obviously, the big figure also knows well this
advantage of social media. Being the president of one of the strongest countries
in the world, Donald Trump always perfectly saves money and time for himself by simply tweeting Twitter posts frequently to show the political or diplomatic stances of the US. Here, we see how powerfully and broadly social media works with its feature.
Whichever approaches have their pros and cons; for example, social media may cause misunderstandings easily and lack physical interaction. However, it can save much time and money in the fast-paced life nowadays. There is no absolute answer when it comes to communication, and none of each is superior to the other one. In my opinion, people should choose the ideal method to communicate mainly according to the discourse content and purpose.
Reference
Brainy quote. Angela Ahrendts quotes.
Retrived from https://reurl.cc/72LroN
