Social Media is Ruining Your Relationships
Topic: how social media is ruining relationships
Purpose: to enlighten a room full of avid social media users of the effects of their habits
Thesis Statement: Social media is ruining relationships
Introduction
Attention Strategy/Orienting Material:
- Personal anecdote – laundry story
- Couldn’t check any social media for days
Body I: Social media enables lies and deceit.
- Family friends anecdote
- Lying to everyone
- Social media isn’t real life
- Happily married couple online, actually separated and preparing for a divorce in real life
- Facebook embellishing
- 75% of people admit to making their lives seem more exciting on social media
- 50% of people post images to make their friends and family jealous
- 75% of people judge their peers based on their Facebook profiles
- People are fake online
- Filters
- Editing apps
- “Best friends” who post together on Instagram all the time, but trash talk each other all the time in real life
Body II: Social media serves as a distraction from the people that matter to us the most.
- Strains on relationships
- Statistics on the effects of social media
- Talking online instead of in real life (snapchat = maintaining streaks, not maintaining a relationship)
- Makes people seem less real
- People are known by their online personas
- Judged by what you post online
- Not by your actions in real life
- When hanging out in person, we ignore our friends
- In some cases social media can be a talking point
- “Did you see this person’s post from last night?”
- But it really only leads to gossip
- Much more often, social media distracts us and we mindlessly scroll or click instead of engaging with friends or family
- In some cases social media can be a talking point
Body III: We can’t “live in the moment” anymore
- We often “live in the future”
- Planning out Instagram posts or wearing an outfit or going on a trip somewhere just to be able to post it on social media later
- So much so that you miss the present moment
- We’re all going through life on fast forward, mentally ending up too far in advance of the present moment
- Or…
- We end up “living in the past”
- We waste time looking through our old tweets or Facebook posts
- We stalk our exes online to remember the way things used to be
- We throw away the present to go back to the past for a little while and that is a pointless way to pass the time
Conclusion: So post, tweet and like with caution because Instagram and Twitter may very well be killing any chance you have of genuine human connection anymore.