Social media has been around since John Locke, “Common Sense”, and Martin Luther “Ninety-five Theses”. This gave the “average joe” a voice. This set the pace for civil right acts, revolutions, and a public voice. The internet, is what has shaped and molded the social media we used today. Only have been around for thirty years the internet and social media has changed the way we live our daily lives. Having seventy plus languages to choose from and over eight- hundred million users on Facebook alone, virtual communication has brought great controversy between young adults “generation Z”, educators, and “baby boomers”. While social media and modern technology has brought many changes, it has created a lack of communication; making punctuation, grammar, and usage deteriorate in our society and in our schools. 

Twitter and Facebook has tremendously effected the way we communicate with the people around us. Psychologist Sherry Turkle, the author of “Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other”. She discuss problem that people face in everyday life. An example “Young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up wearing earphones”. Social media connects people in seconds, anytime, anywhere. But one thing social media cannot replace conversation which is only way to really connect with someone my generation’s idea of being social can be explained in just a few fraises also written by psychologist Sherry Turkle.  We are “Alone together...”, “I share therefore I am”, are examples of how much we value online communication. This is known as the “goldilocks effect”. An Idea of Sherry Turkle, where people us social media to control their personal relationships, not to close and not too far.
Language is single most important parts of human interaction. Text speech has become the new proper English. Every day conversations and essays assigned in school include words such as “lol” and shortened words like,”u”. Besides the change in the spelling of words and creation of new ones, social media such as twitter or text messaging has changed the meaning and use of the “period”, and other punctuation marks. Ben Crair author of New Republic’s, “The Period Is Pissed”. He stated,” punctuation marks have been largely replaced by line breaks”. Crair says that “punctuation became way to structure text according to its own unique hierarchy”. The period went from a neutral way to mark a pause into something more aggressive. A period in a sentence is now just as important all the other words making up sentence, this could easily become confusing.
Others have opposing views point, many believe that social media is helping our writing skills claiming that their “friends” help correct their mistakes. But the problem with that is we aren’t learning from these simple spelling and punctuation mistakes. We should self-check and catch our own mistakes before they are viewed by the public.
Another claim people makes is that social media is just the same as a real conversation. This cannot be because as a society we our always editing every little detail of our physical self to society’s ideal beauty, and we lie to are screens about who we really are. It’s a game, so shut it down and live is the real world.
Be Brave enough to start a conversation that matters- Margret Wheathly
The solution to these problems, isn’t to throw your phone away or go anti-social media. Setting boundaries between ourselves and our phones is first. Then we need to knock down the walls between us and the people we love. Facebook and Twitter has changed our language but this generation is still the most literate yet, to keep improving we should make lessons off the common mistakes teenagers and young adults make and teach them to understand there’s a time and place for text-speak. Put your head up, turn the screens off, and start a conversation with the people around you.