Living in an era where our lives are predominantly governed by digitalisation, social intelligence has somewhere taken a back seat. Scrolling our social media feeds and reels seems more rewarding and relaxing than face-to-face socialising with a bunch of people.
Easier is to express yourself via thumbs up or a smiley face without actually showing up the real facial expressions. No, it's not wrong, but somehow it has diminished the need to interact socially smoothly.
Social media has become an expansive stage with countless opportunities ranging from networking, marketing, advertising, socialising and entertainment. The need of the moment is to develop a keen insight into how to streamline social media in your stride and master the balance of online and offline social intelligence. Like the real world, there are fraudsters running accounts creating crappy or misleading content that is making things worse.
Taking the present-day kids or youth into consideration, it's no more a rare sight to witness them scrolling low-quality or meaningless content in a never-ending vicious loop. We are left to imagine for ourselves where this youth will be headed to leave after consuming such content for hours and hours on a daily basis. Not surprising is to acknowledge that kids are no longer interested in making social connections or interactions.
The prime reason being their brains are adapted to the instant rewarding system, where scrolling or constant watching diminishes the desire to look up or make efforts how to be present in a real offline world. Moreover, it is killing the creativity, logic and reasoning abilities of the brain.
Of course, we cannot abandon social media usage, but we can definitely set some parameters as to how it shapes our lives and hence our social intelligence.
As per a study published in PubMed Central, “the strength of SI (social intelligence) contributes to the improvement of affect balance (ie, experiencing more pleasant emotions than unpleasant ones), global judgments of one’s life and quality relations with others, which in turn results in less psychological distress.”
Further, the study continues to emphasise the importance of enhancing and improving individuals’ SI as a strategy to promote optimal mental well-being and prevent mental disorders.
As mentioned earlier, social media is like an unfathomable source of anything. It lies upon us how vigilant we are in exploring this vast ocean to benefit our well-being. If we can connect through the right portals, the right people and verified accounts who are doing a tremendous job in catering meaningful content and scientific-backed information to the masses that will immensely help in reviving and cultivating our social intelligence.
Equally pivotal is when we reflect that our social media usage shouldn’t be merely confined to checking our friends' updates or getting swayed by our favourite influencers' recent vacation trips and filter perfect photos. The social media realm is deceptive and we need to comprehend the different realities of the virtual and real world. Getting influenced by such stuff will only land in comparison, feelings of dissatisfaction and eventually opening up a gateway to anxiety and depression.
If we could put some effort into exploring and introducing our kids to educational and meaningful content and sticking to a proper timetable for that, it can tremendously help to regain their creativity and inculcate social intelligence.
Nevertheless, we should never forget that the human brain is the epitome of all digital intelligence put together and we should utilise it to tame the rest, rather than being mindlessly driven by it and putting our social intelligence for a petty barter.
The writer is a general physician and content creator
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