a. What was the purpose of creating social media?

The primary purpose of creating social media is to mediate the creation of meaningful
connections between people. It does this by creating digital communities where each individual
would supposedly have a voice and be part of a larger purpose. Such voice would supposedly
empower people and in turn, would lead to positive changes in the real world.

b. Was this purpose achieved?

The purpose was not achieved. Instead of making meaningful connections, social media has
increased polarization. Take Facebook for example. Facebook has been a platform for political
division in the 2016 Philippine presidential elections. It has fueled the proliferation of fake news
that severely damaged our information ecosystem, an essential part of any democracy. It continues
to damage it today by enabling the proliferation of “trolls” who get paid to like, comment on, and
share posts to bolster support for the administration, as found by a study conducted by Oxford
University.

On the individual level, social media has done more harm than benefit. The world is seeing a rise
in social media addiction where people, mostly of whom are the young, are spending more time in
social media than ever before. To many, it has become a limb that we carry along with us wherever
we go. Though the intended purpose of social media is to facilitate the creation of communities in
the real world, what it has done is it has replaced them instead with echo chambers. Instead of
interacting with people from all walks of life, we have instead surrounded ourselves by people who
have exactly the same ideas and beliefs as ours. We like pages that conform to our prejudices, and
we unfriend and block people who do not conform to our beliefs.

c. I agree with the general claims of the speaker that social media has made us less social. We have
preferred the immediate gratification that social media provides to us that comes in the form of
instant messaging and instant response, and sometimes, short and immediate conversations over
face-to-face interactions that force us to pay attention to nuanced things such as eye contact, hand
gestures, facial expressions, and the importance of taking effort to prolong conversations.

Moreover, it has made us less social by empowering our prejudices. It has become easier to be
critical of our friends and other people with their beliefs that do not conform with ours, that in turn
damage our personal relationships with them. Through social media, we lost the capacity to hold
meaningful conversations to have disagreements, and instead we resorted to “muting” and
“unfriending” other people instead.

Indeed, the digital world, though it intended to facilitate real world interactions, has instead
replaced them. The nuances of expressing oneself’s emotions has been reduced to mere “reactions”
of likes, sad, angry, laugh, love, and surprised buttons. The relentless urge to check our social media
has taken most of our time that could have been allotted to face-to-face interactions. The importance
of expressing emotions without the use of words has not been given a platform in the digital sphere.

I believe a viable solution to this is to hold the big social media corporations accountable. Because
of their self-interest to accrue profits, they have relied on psychological tricks that force us to spend
more time in social media than we intend to. What they must instead do is to redesign their product
models that take into account social media addiction and provide avenues for meaningful
interactions. This may be difficult for a corporation, but I believe its responsibility is not to its
stakeholders but to the world.