Is Whatsapp a Social Crisis or a New Age?

Is Whatsapp a Lack of Communication in the Communication Age?

After prehistoric times came antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the modern period. Now we are said to have moved beyond the modern period into the communication age , which mobile phones are said to have initiated. Mobile phones have become smart. As smartphones spread, various applications have also become indispensable. WhatsApp, enabling internet-based video and voice calls and sharing our moments, voice recordings and even office documents, is one of these and the most widespread.

With WhatsApp, text messaging (SMS) has fallen almost to zero, and telephone operators have shifted emphasis to internet packages as people’s demands change. Whatsapp provides considerable convenience: instant communication, free contact even from abroad, unlimited messaging and calling, sharing contacts, location reporting, group communication, mass messaging and even contact sharing. Its greatest advantage may be that all these services and the application are completely free and advertisement-free.

So What Harms Does Whatsapp, Now an Indispensable Part of Our Lives, Cause?

Privacy

With recent updates, end-to-end encryption keeps messages between us and the recipient and encrypts them against 3rd parties. This prevents hackers, government agencies and internet providers from monitoring our messages. But can we know that the privacy of all data collected centrally is ensured? No. How this free application earns revenue is one of the most frequently questioned issues. Various claims began emerging after Facebook acquired whatsapp, including use of our data for advertising and access by certain intelligence services and governments. We are talking about a data source of approximately 42 billion messages daily (in January 2014, on New Year’s Day, a record of 64 billion was set).

How Does It Affect Our Daily Life?

Problems of Trust Between People

Whatsapp provides last-seen times, message delivery status through ticks, profile pictures and, with recent updates, a story feature to inform users. Recently, we have encountered reports such as “Whatsapp caused a divorce.” Reasons include reading messages without replying (blue ticks), late-night last-seen times and accidentally sending messages to unintended people. Judging others by a few ticks or last-seen times causes major trust problems.

The Invisible Headphones We Wear

We now frequently encounter people holding phones who are insensitive to their surroundings. We live among people concentrating all their attention on screens, not listening to those in front of them, as though wearing invisible headphones, writing rather than speaking.

The Urge to Check Constantly

People are becoming obsessed with message status and feel a constant need to check. Questions such as whether a message was delivered or read, what someone shared in their story today, or whether they updated their profile picture and status make people addicted to the application. According to a United States study, approximately %43 of the population lives in this described pattern.

Impatience

When people communicated by letter, a message could take 15 days to arrive and receive a reply, yet this brought great excitement. In today’s relationships, even replying 5 minutes after seeing a message can cause arguments. People expect immediate replies. This impatience causes more than communication problems; it affects daily life too.

Unhappiness

Social media users at an addictive level feel inadequate and unhappy by comparing themselves with others, failing to recognize the misconception that everything shared is real. Posts about a new car, a vacation or a happy family scene can reduce motivation in people lacking these things. On WhatsApp, one of the most frequently used social media applications, we encounter these posts in stories, group messages, status updates and profile pictures.

Problems Caused by Group Conversations

It is certainly lovely to see the cutest photograph of your grandchild, whom you have not seen for months, in your Whatsapp “family group”; however, being asked to make vital treatment decisions from an image of a barely legible pathology report for a patient you have never examined is extremely challenging...

Whatsapp users form various group chats around shared goals: school, work, family or social assistance groups. Users may find themselves in more than 10 active whatsapp groups. Struggling to check all conversations, they become both uncomfortable and addicted because of notifications sent to others when they leave a group or click a chat bubble containing hundreds of messages.

As seen in the statistics for Facebook, which recently reached 2 billion subscribers, and whatsapp, with 1.2 billion users, social media and smartphones have become indispensable parts of our lives. We must, of course, use these enormously beneficial applications appropriately. When using them, we should take care:

• Not to isolate ourselves from our surroundings
• Not to waste unnecessary time
• To recognize that posts on screens are “moments” from people’s lives and do not reflect their entire lives
• Not to judge others by only a few ticks or notifications
• And not to share private information we would not want others to know.

Although life is speeding up, strangely we devote less time each day to ourselves and those closest to us. Even though modern-life products such as Whatsapp draw us in while causing some emotional and physical harm, balancing their use remains in our hands. We can live more healthily by using technology no more than needed, communicating more face to face, increasing physical activity and spending more time in nature.