Perhaps you wouldn't be awake late at night scrolling your time away into timeline updates. Perhaps you would be out in the leisure places, enjoying the outdoor air instead of staying stuck at home with your face glued to the screen. Perhaps your sister would be out in the streets running and playing, and getting that childhood sunshine tan and sweating through her clothes, the way childhood is supposed to be spent.

Social media, however, does exist, and this is probably where you and a whole lot of your friends and family spend most of your time. It's not a " sa main noon ", kind of critic, there is an existing statistic to this claim. Philippines leads in most hours spent on the internet, spending an average of 8 hours a day, half of it in social media for a good reason. Social media is designed to be addicting, from the poppy colorful design to the content it feeds you, all meant to make you spend more time on the platform. The awesome invention of the 21st century, supposed to make communication fast and easy, started to take away the interpersonal relationship you're supposed to develop with other people. Making it hard to relate with each other and to ourselves. Teenagers and adult now prefer to be in Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram, among others, forging relationships with shares and likes, instead of building bridges with actual people. We are somehow opting for a new way of being alone together, where everyone wants to be with each other, but also elsewhere. Friends hang out together, bit spend majority of their time on their phones.

This is trend you see everywhere, communication devices becoming a replacement for actual conversations and relationships. Technology is an extension of ourselves, such, they become part of our identity as they grow to become an everyday component of our lives. Social Media gave everyone a platform to share details about their lives and their thought to friends and total strangers, allowing you to " doctor" your identity create version of yourself in the sea of shares, comments, and likes. You don't get to do that in realtime communication but in social media you are able to edit and delete the content you created, you get to correct what you recognize is an error and build a facade for the public to your liking.

As such, people start getting used to being short changed out real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they have become almost willing to dispense with people altogether. This is probably why there are more of us turning to social media, the very medium causing the problem. When you are made to fell as though no one is listening to you, social media becomes a replacement for human compassion, warmth, and connection. Unknown to you though, you are isolating yourself from the rest of the world, because no matter how hard and smartly designed these machines are, there is one thing that they can not do and that is to feel emotions.

There is the danger of dehumanization in this. Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online not an effect of it. Without a real world counterpart internet contact gets dishonest and weird. Online, people are reduced to mere figures and icons. The lack of expression and emotion makes hate easier to spawn. Everyone will probably agree that voicing out opinion online is becoming a struggle considering the risk of fueling conflict. There is a wave of hate and antagonism targeted towards various groups and individuals for simply taking a stand. The name calling, cussing and shaming is easily thrown to other people, as though it were an everyday matter.

Final thoughts

If the problem stems from people inability to pop the personal bubble fuelled by social media, then everyone can start by listening to people more. Understand that the conviction you feel towards your belief and opinion is the same conviction felt by the other person towards his own, no matter how irrational it sounds.