By Sabina Elago
WINDHOEK– Yes it does keep people that are far from each other connected, but is it keeping the one closer away? Is the growth of social media causing distraction and leading people to become loners?
Norman Ndeuyeka a student at the University of Namibia says young people spend countless hours on social network that it took up much of their time in a sense that they use more of their time on different sites. He adds that because social media seems to make interaction much easier, this causes less face-to-face interaction as they now believe that they are likely to express or voice their opinions on certain topics. Also through the social media networks young people learn different cultures, which they tend to adopt and practice. “They either demonstrate their new learnt culture by the way they talk, walk or behave in the presence of their parents. Such behaviour is often offending to parents that might result in hostility between the two parties,” says Ndeuyeka.
On the other hand, he adds, social networks promote plagiarism and take up much of learners and students’ time. They cause leaners and students to be lazy as they spend much of their time on the networks than on their school work or books. “This results in them not doing well in school and much of the
productive things in their academic life,” he says. Ndeuyeka points out that different sites comes with tempting packages which needs hours of experiment which than leads to young people neglecting their academic and school work. “These mushrooming sites are taking up most if not of all our time because they come in handy,” he says.
For Jane Kabimbe, an Immigration Official, personal relationships are killed as people are more reliant on social networks than on face-to-face interaction. “People do not have time to spend with others anymore, all we have time for is to chat on sites,” she says. Kabimbe adds that social media is impersonal and most of the people there are fake. “You can hardly see how the person feels, than when you are face-to-face with them that you can see their expressions,” she says.
Nowadays teenage pay more attention and spend more time on social media, than with their parents or siblings and they take it as their first source of advice before their parents and it is very wrong. “It is more important to learn from the people around you than from social networks,” she says.
“As Africans we use to visit each other but now social media keep us in connection that we hardly do that anymore. It connects people but yet keep the one close far. This is village blocking and it is turning people into loners,” says Kabimbe.