The Inspiration of Fitivity: Using Social Media without Loneliness

As a new social way, social media takes many efficient functions to us: posting, sharing, writing status and so on. Beyond telephone and mail, social media makes us can feel the benefits from technology development. Especially in the recent years, using social media become an important part in one's life, we can check our social media conveniently in any place and any time.

However, when you are enjoying this new social way, some other parts of your life is slipping away: "posts", "comments" and "likes" become the new ways to communicate with your friends, they take place of some "real social interactions". There is a word could reflect our feeling in this moment: Loneliness.

For this problem, Sherry Turkle, who is the author of "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other", she made an psychological analysis around this phenomenon in Ted Talks. She mentioned several disadvantages of social media, and they are making people "hiding from each other", "alone together",  and "no one is listening". Her presentation illustrated how does social media make conversation becomes connection, then becomes isolation. The length of her Ted Talks presentation is 19min49s. It is a long one, but I believe you will thank for her if you would like to view it:

"Even loneliness is horrible, I don't want to give up my social medias because all of my friends have them. There must be a way to solve this problem!" Yes, you are right. The problem of loneliness does not come from social medias themselves, it depends on the way we treat, use and manage them. There is one thing we should remember when we are using social medias: No matter how powerful they are, they are always our tools.

Now, there is a good tool (social media) can keep our efficient connection without loneliness: Fitivity.

What is fitivity? Fitivity = Fit + Activity. It is an app which is used to organize or participate workouts on your phone. 

     

Fitivity is very easy to use, you just need to download and register an account on it, then you can choose your favorite workouts to organize or participate, like "let's play tennis together in the school tennis court at 2:00 pm on tomorrow!". Base on the location function, you can also find the workout events near you. Please click "here" to watch a demonstrated video about fitivity. 

Fitivity gives us an inspiration: if we can make social media and real social interactions support each other, loneliness would be eliminated. Don't let social media takes place of real party, but use social media to facilitate real party.

It is an simple logic: when people are using social media to plan an event, the process (use social media) and the result (attend to gathering) are both welcome. Using social media is an efficient and interactive way to plan an event, it gives people a period of time to decide whether attending or not, to get ready for it, and to see what is actually happening before this event comes. I think if people attend to gathering by this way, they would feel more comfortable with the help of social media.

Fitivity is not the only one of this kind of social media. Many mainstream social media are developing the similar functions now. A good example is the "Event" function of Facebook, it allows user to crate new events, share them, or invite friends. The "Event" function of Facebook can set different security level, that's why we successfully organized an surprised birthday party for my friend in this spring.

Think about human nature, people need the real social interactions. So "event function" would be a very popular part of social media, and it can be a trend of social media development. Along with the development of "event function", huge resources would come into this field. Advertising, paymium, subscribing and so on, all of them can motivate developers and investors to raise this field in social media. 

I believe more and more people would like to enjoy "event function". Try it, and let us use social media without loneliness!