The increase in technology has brought this decade to places that people would have never thought possible but it does not come without negative effects. I am doing my research paper on how technology has changed social skills. This is the first time in history where the older generation can learn from the younger generation who is more proficient in technology like cell phones, texting, and the internet. People interact with each other less face to face and more through the internet or cell phones. The fact that the person you are conversing with cannot hear your tone or see your body language significantly detracts from the quality of the communication. The technology acts as a safety blanket increasing confidence and decreasing discretion but because of this people have lost valuable personal skills and public speaking abilities. Thesis: Today’s technology is significantly decreasing social skills of young adults.
To research this topic I will look for articles and journals about technology and things such as public speaking abilities and the psychology of social skills. Also, articles about how tone and body language play a part in communication would be helpful. I have found an article from the Oxford Journals at about how texting is causing literacy problems that includes a study to test teens on their texting and literary skills. It also talks about how the use of texting has increased a lot over the past couple years. I found another article about how the internet causes or is a product of loneliness which is relevant to the social skills of people using the internet and such. The other sources I found were about social consequences of the internet on adolescents, social skills being affected by the internet, and online relationships and how technology affects relationships. I would like to research more to find specific articles about cell phones and technology.
I speculate that I will run across problems in distinguishing credible sources from those that are not as credible like opinion articles and such. The topic of technology and social skills is relevant today so there are probably various opinion articles about texting and video gaming that would not be good to use as sources. Also, I might have some trouble finding sources in general. To avoid these problems I will try to examine the authors and organizations that I come across, and use better search engines like Google scholar and OneSearch on the Clemson website for internet sources. I also might have trouble organizing my paper because of the many different subtopics that technology can bring about. To resolve this I will try to narrow my focus as much as possible and use organizational devices such as charts or diagrams to outline paragraphs.
