Social Media Is Actually Making You Socially Awkward

Social Media Is Actually Making You Socially Awkward

How often have you misinterpreted the meaning of a text message due to lack of tone, context or general connection with the person on the other side of the conversation?

The ubiquitousness -- and our reliance -- on technology and social media might be to blame for these miscommunications and overall inability to carry on a normal, face-to-face conversation. Justine Harman, Elle.com features editor, and Tara Kennedy-Kline, author of Stop Raising Einstein, joined HuffPost Live host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani to discuss how our tethers to technology are making us socially awkward -- and sometimes even creepy.

Several months ago, Harman published an article online titled “How Social Media Is Ruining My Social Skills,” which explores how strange it feels to know about friends’ and acquaintances’ life events before we even see them in person and ask about them.

“I think it’s the death of an actual civilized conversation,” she says. “I think it’s skipping a lot of steps. You don’t know people the way you would if you actually spent time with them. It feels inherently wrong to make those leaps, but at the same time, it’s inauthentic to say that you don’t know.”

Kline, who approaches this issue by analyzing the country’s youngest generation, feels that connecting primarily through social media actually ends up making us socially awkward.

“I think that there’s a lot of things we don’t understand how to have conversations about anymore,” she says. “I think our kids are kind of getting addicted to it. Our kids don’t know how to have conversations. ... There are simple social skills that we are completely losing an entire generation of because we only do anything online.”

To hear more about how social media could be ruining your social life, watch the full HuffPost Live clip in the video above.

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