Today’s Ted talk topic is on how social media makes us unsocial and how it’s disconnecting us from a lot of things. Our speaker in this ted talk is Allison Graham, Allison Graham is going to explain to us the effects that social media has on us and how we can make a change. In 2001 a poll was taken and it asked how many close friends does an average American have; the results came up to be 10 really close friends. About 13 years later they took the same exact poll and this time the results were the average American only have 2 really close friends. As you can see the increase in years of using social media people became less social causing a decrease in friendships and making new friends. There are three steps to solving this social/disconnection problem that we have upon us; the three steps are spotting the problem, what caused the problem, and fix the problem. A study showed that we check/touch our phone about 150 times a day broken down between messages, calls/voice mails, and social media. Allison also added how she see people out places with their family, on a date, or even at a function and wonder how they are able to enjoy themselves when they don’t even take time off their phones and live.

At this point our problem is pretty clear, we pay more attention to our phones than anything else that’s going on around us. Majority of the world lives life through social media in the ted talk Allison stated that we upload 1.8 billion pictures a day to Facebook, that’s a little over a 6 of the population. Most people pretend to be this perfect person or to live a perfect life and to keep anyone from exposing them they try to live a low profile life and not make any friends. In some cases they are so wrapped up in the social media world that they don’t have time to make friends or maybe they just don’t know how to make friends and that’s the disconnection problem we have. Also because of social media and our phones we have shorten our vocabulary, Allison then stated “when we abbreviate our vocabulary what we risk is losing the nuances and subtleties and intimate parts of our personalities that make up our very rich American vocabulary.” (Allison Graham) On social media we use words like lol, omg, otw etc. causing us to not think as hard. Have you ever had that moment where you forget how to spell the simplest words? Your phone is part of that reason why. Allison then went on to say “with shortening things we lose and run the risk of not being able to fully express ourselves and communicate as we move forward and that losing vocabulary equals a potential loss of being able to express ourselves.” (Allison Graham) Although there are still many people who don’t believe that our phones and social media is the cause of this disconnection, these facts have proved that it has indeed changed us in many ways.

Our phones and social media have become our biggest distractions in life. For example, we can be on our way somewhere and leave our phone home. Some of us if we could we would turn back around even though we were half way there to a very important meeting. For the other half who couldn’t turn around, us not having our phones would be on our mind all day. Most people could not even have a productive day without their phones; they would be a little thrown off. Because people can’t seem to stay off their phones for 5mins, texting and driving has become the number one cause of deaths especially by teens. In the Ted talk Allison used texting and driving and the normal speed as an example, “If you’re driving 55mph and you look down at your phone for five seconds you just now have driven the length of an entire football field completely blindfolded.” (Allison Graham) Just imagining that seems very scary to me and it sounds extremely dangerous. A few years ago the cause of most car deaths were because of drinking and driving. If we want to prevent these distractions and disconnections we have to encourage each other to put our phones down and live in the moment. Encourage each other to put our phones down for at least an hour a day and eventually we can extend the time until the point where we don’t need our phones to have fun.