Ted Talk Script Draft

Standard

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.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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.

  1. Strains on relationships
    • Statistics on the effects of social media
    • Talking online instead of in real life (snapchat = maintaining streaks, not maintaining a relationship)
  2. 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
  3. 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

Body III: We can’t “live in the moment” anymore

  1. 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…
  2. 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.

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