I have found a few articles about social medias and how they affected face to face conversational skills.

Based on the first two articles written by Jijian Chen and Nischolas Dantuono, social media is giving the
bad effects to their users that is killing their communication skills. Most of the social media’s users that
are addicted to them are teenagers, they spend more time online and will have less desire to have
communication in real life cause them to gradually lose face to face communication. However, the third
article written by James Gurd tend to look on their good effects of social networking.

I agree with those first two writers that social media kill face to face conversational skills. Lack of face to
face communication prompts people’s absence of representing their verbal expressions and using
proper body language. Without practicing enough face to face communications, people are inclined to
choose wrong words or long sentences when giving their opinions and thoughts. Furthermore, they
always use short forms like ‘LOL’ and ‘OTW’ and bad grammars when texting. In real life, to start a
communication with person that we have never met before, may not happen if we don’t confidence
about ourselves. This confidence thing doesn’t come by itself, we need to train them. In social media,
we can read people’s profiles before we start a ‘talk’. Normally, we will choose to ‘talk’ to the person
that have same interests with us, how can this improve our confidence level? In real life, there are no
profiles written on their head, we cannot know who have the same interests with us. We need to start a
talk to knowing each others.

On the other hand, James Gurd believed that social media can improves our communication skills and
opening up our inter-personal skills. The ideas he brought are actually improving the communication
skills and not face to face communication. However, I think we can ‘add-on’ on the ideas so they can
improve our face to face communication skills. On some social media like Twitter and so on, they have
the words limit for a post. This actually can help improve communication as people only write on what is
relevant and important. On a formal talk for example, people only delivered important things. Beside
that, social tool like blogs encourages people to share their knowledge or experiences. By having blog’s
readers or follower, they will try to write in a formal, good structure and grammars.

As a solution for this problem, we need to use social media effectively and acceptably. People can
balance their online communication and face to face interactions well by following these suggestions.
The primary way is to set a strict schedule. We should consider what we want and how we can use it
more wisely and effectively. Next, we should set our time when we can use Internet. For example, when
we hanging with our friends, we should not play with our phones. Lastly, like I said before, we should
texting in a formal way with good structure and grammars, so it will improves our conversations in daily
life.