English in the
media
English communication Epm 2
Topic: Social Media
Decock Lisa
EPM203A
2021-2022
,Table of contents
1 Articles...........................................................................................................................................2
1.1 Can we take the hatred out of social media?...............................................................................2
Vocabulary list:...............................................................................................................................5
Summary article:.............................................................................................................................6
1.2 Top 7 Impacts of Social Media: Advantages and Disadvantages..................................................7
Vocabulary list:.............................................................................................................................10
Summary article:...........................................................................................................................10
1.3 The Social Dilemma: Social Media and Your Mental Health.......................................................11
Vocabulary list:.............................................................................................................................14
Summary article:...........................................................................................................................14
1.4 How Social Media Affects Teens.................................................................................................15
Vocabulary list:.............................................................................................................................17
Summary article:...........................................................................................................................17
2 Personal commentary...................................................................................................................18
3 BROADCASTS: TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS..............................................................................19
3.1 What my gender transition taught me about womanhood........................................................19
3.2 Lean messaging: How simple messages really stick think fast, talk smart: communication
techniques........................................................................................................................................19
3.3 How to be less Clumsy................................................................................................................20
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, 1 Articles
1.1 Can we take the hatred out of social media?
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/10/can-we-take-the-
hatred-out-of-social-media-
Date : April 10, 2022
Number of words: 2390
Leah McLaren
While travelling in an ambulance, Chris Jones became fascinated by the cool way the crew coped.
What could be learned from them – and how could we use that to rise above the relentless noise of
social media?
‘You just have to learn how to do it right,’ says Chris, who now blocks liberally and does not engage in
arguments or defend himself against trolls. Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Observer
Sun 10 Apr 2022 15.00 BST
Back in 2009, Chris Jones, a seasoned staff writer for Esquire US, was given a life-changing
assignment – an open-ended, reportage-driven magazine feature on the lives of paramedics. For an
entire month, Jones, then in his mid-30s, hurtled around Ottawa, Ontario in a screaming ambulance
with a team of first responders.
“There is your life before the truck and there is your life after the truck,” the piece begins. What he
learned in that truck would later become a key insight in his latest book, The Eye Test: A Case for
Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics. Jones found himself overwhelmed by the noise of the CB
radio, which blared a constant stream of panic, one disaster scenario after another – car crashes,
house fires, stabbings, seizures and domestic hellscapes.
“Inside the van, it felt like the world was ending,” Jones told me over Zoom from his home in Port
Hope, “but then I’d look out the window and everything was perfectly calm. Normal. People were
walking down the street oblivious.” As Jones struggled to reconcile these two realities he noticed the
medics themselves were curiously unaffected. Sure, they listened to the shrieking radio and
responded accordingly – responding to emergencies was, quite literally, their job – but the chaos in
the truck didn’t freak them out. They were practical, easy-going and, Jones realised over time,
astonishingly happy. Not happy in a manic or delirious, shell-shocked way, but calm and content.
Slowly it dawned on him that the medics had a rare skill, one that most of us lack – a skill that was
just as invaluable for their own mental health as their ability to perform an emergency tracheotomy
or CPR was for their patients.
The skill was this: They knew what a real problem was.
“It really was that simple,” Jones recalls with a chuckle. “They’d have a bad day and go, ‘Well at least
I don’t have a fencepost through my chest!’ I mean, people make jokes like that, but the difference
was, these guys actually meant it.”
‘I’m not suggesting we turn the internet off. But if it’s not making us feel good any more, we ought to
do something about it’: Chris Jones at home in Ontario. Photograph: Cole Burston/The Observer
In the age of social media, Jones says, it’s as if we’ve all been thrown in the back of the truck with the
CB radio blaring panic at full blast 24/7. Unlike the paramedics, we feel helpless in the truck. That’s
because we have no plan or sense of purpose. The world is on fire and there’s nothing we can do
about it except join the shrieking chorus. This, Jones explains, is how algorithms can suffocate human
creativity. In order to deal with the chaos thrown at us by the CB radio of social media, many of us
fall into binary thought traps. We sort people, events, issues and experiences into black or white files
– good/evil, right/wrong, progressive/conservative – when in fact all these things are far more
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