Everyone craves community whether they want to admit it or not. Community provides a sense of belonging and helps to improve a person’s mental and physical health. Without community, we feel isolated.

Over the last decade, a sense of community has become increasingly difficult to reach. Face-to-face interactions have become harder to maintain due to the ongoing rise of social media. With social media, people don’t need facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language, which are crucial for teaching us effective communication and understanding the message behind someone’s words.

Face-to-face contact allows us to truly comprehend what a person is saying; we also continue to learn how to interact with others, building our social skills.

When communicating through social media, behind a screen, children and teens aren’t able to learn these skills, making it harder for them to know how to interact with other students. Social media deters children and teens from developing and learning essential communication skills.

Now, as a college student, it feels more challenging to try to bond with the other students. Conversations often feel more like transactions rather than meaningful moments of friendship. Technology has made socializing more convenient but also more impersonal and transactional.

On today’s college campuses, making friends should be easier with the use of texting and DMing; however, students feel lonelier and more disconnected. Technology has turned socializing into quick exchanges of snaps or likes rather than real, genuine conversation. Communicating through screens loses all the most important parts of conversation. Building meaningful relationships has grown increasingly complex, and humans are more disconnected than ever.

Hopefully, in the future, people will realize the harm that online communication is doing to everyone. Maybe then, a genuine connection will be easier to find.