Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Modern technology, such as smartphones and social media, has made people less social. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

In modern society, technology is developing very fast, and almost everyone has a smartphone now. Some people think technology make people less social¹. I partly agree with this opinion, but I also think technology has some good effect on our social life.

On the one hand, I admit that technology sometimes make people less social. For example, when friends have dinner together, many people always look at their phone and don't talk with each other. This is not good for the relationship. Also, some young people spend too much time on the internet and social media, so they don't want to go outside and meet real people. They only have online friend but no real friend.²

On the other hand, technology also make people more social in some way. Because of the social media, we can keep in touch with our friends who live in far away places. In the past, if your friend move to another city, you will lose contact easily³. But now, we can chat with them by wechat or send message anytime, so our relationship become closer.

In conclusion, I think technology has both good and bad effect on our social life. It depends on how we use it. If we use technology in a correct way, it will make our life more convenient and our relationship more better⁴. So we should use technology wisely.

In a word, technology is a double-edged sword, we should use the good side and avoid the bad side.⁵

Whether smartphones and social media have made us less social is harder to answer than it first appears, because the question hides an assumption: that the connection these tools remove and the connection they add are the same kind¹. I disagree with the claim that technology has made people less social, but only after redefining what "social" is being measured, since the technology has not reduced our contact so much as changed its texture.

It is true that devices routinely interrupt the situations we most associate with closeness. Anyone who has watched a table of friends fall silent over their screens knows the phone can hollow out a shared moment², replacing presence with a hundred shallow elsewhere-connections. If being social means undivided, face-to-face attention, then technology has plainly eroded it, and dismissing that cost would be dishonest.

Yet this framing quietly ignores the enormous volume of connection these same tools create. A person who might once have lost every friendship that survived only through proximity can now sustain dozens of them across cities and decades; a shy teenager who struggles in a crowded room can find, online, a community built around exactly their interest. These are not lesser relationships simply because they are mediated by a screen. The relevant question is not whether we interact less, but whether the interaction we have gained is thinner than the interaction it displaced.³

My answer is that it is different rather than uniformly thinner, and that the outcome depends on substitution. When online contact replaces relationships that would otherwise have existed in person, something real is lost, because a screen filters out tone, touch and full attention. But when it maintains relationships that distance would otherwise have ended, or reaches people who were already isolated, it is pure gain. The tool itself is neutral; what determines the effect is whether it is adding connections we could not have had or subtracting ones we would have had anyway⁴.

For this reason I resist the blanket claim that technology has made people less social. It has made us social in a different register — wider, shallower and less bound by place⁵ — and whether that trade impoverishes or enriches a given person depends almost entirely on what their online hours are replacing.