NrK P2 Ekko - Do the social medias make us more social?

After the exciting experience of having NrK P2 Ekko visiting us at school, our class was invited to join them for their weekly live broadcast from Kulturhuset at Youngstorget. Some of us were once again sharing our broad knowledge and familiarity with the social medias, as the topic for this Tuesday´s broadcast was whether social medias make us more social or not!

The host of the show sat on a stage in front of us joined by “experts”, as far as one can be an expert on such a phenomenon, and quite a few interesting sides of the social medias were made clear to me. This is by no means an unknown topic to me, so I had a good idea of what would be discussed, but I was pleasantly surprised by the experts and their points of view. An important aspect that was brought up , in my opinion, was that the debate and attention around the use of social medias, is heavily influenced by the younger crowd. What is left out at many occasions is that the amount of users on the social medias exceed the youngsters by far, and that the older part of the users should not be left out.

Not to get off topic, do social medias make us more social? I myself actively utilize a variety of social medias during a day, and I would like to think they make me more social. However, defining “social” is crucial to this. If being social simply means I communicate or interact with other people, then sure, I´m social. Do social medias provide me with social experiences in any other way than me chatting with friends though? Do I meet new people online that I proceed to develop a real-life friendship with? I´m not so sure about that, and in a lot of scenarios, the social medias may prevent physical interactions with others, in the sense that I could rather just tell them what I´d like to say over Facebook.

At Ekko, they concluded to a certain degree that social medias make you more social, and I agree to that. It was a new and fun experience and I´d like to do it again, but I regret not volunteering to speak on behalf of my class. Nevertheless, I will bring what I learned from this along the way, as I´m positive this is not a topic that will fall off the hype-train anytime soon!