This has got nothing to do with us being social, rather what social media can achieve.

Exactly. People cannot be mass controlled; ask yourself how many people use social media the way it was meant to be used. It is not an idealistic world, there are people out there with other intents. Social media, hence, is causing people to be that much less social. We cannot take a perfect example and use it, because that is definitely not how things work.

Excuse me? Do note that China has a strict policy and limits the use of social media in that country. When it comes to personal expression or free speech in China, it is very limited, especially since in the field of the rule of the central government, little has changed in its repressive methods of control. Facebook and Twitter are banned indefinitely, since July 2009, along with YouTube and Flickr.

Do note that I just disputed on the fact that one of your teammates are using the voluminous amount of tweets being created on Twitter everyday as evidence of how social media is making people become more social.

If they can even connect through twitter, what is stopping them from getting each other's numbers to converse through phones?

Social media, like Facebook, includes games that people can play for free. There are quite a number of people that go on Facebook just for the games and not to actually become social and connect with other people-- They may just be bored and games on Facebook may be a good way to pass the time for them.

Exactly. It is beause of such "commenting things of their daily life" that has made such social media less social. It is because they just go online for the sake of going online and, being bored, just simply comment on the little things which quite frankly annoys most of the other people online. Therefore, with this, they would know the character of the person posting all of this and avoid them in real life as the person would be judged as irritating, etc, and they would never get to know the true side of that person.

Talking to each other when people are bored can actually be much more entertaining and fruitful than to just talk online with conversations being full of "lols" and other things than having a meaningful conversation.

Having such a large number of tweets is not necessarily a good thing, for such tweets, there is always the chance that the tweets might be about advertisements promoting a certain product or service, telling people to "Check this out!" and not actually having any practical, conversational social contact between them.

I agree that social media is making us less social.

In the case of North Korea, they misuse the social media, spreading propaganda about how great the leaders of the country/ how great the country itself is, and even using social media such as Twitter to spread false information, such as other countries being responsible for conspiracy and attacks against the country. This in turn harms relationships between countries, and therefore any chances of having positive social contact between the countries lessen.

Think, if Farquhar had not followed. Raffles had to leave for Bencoolen shortly after, whatever he had planned for would immediately have crumbled as he left for a long time and his plans would have no action taken. It would all perish as a horrible experiment.

Raffles left Singapore for a few years, whereas the examples that you are giving are not related to the subject at all. Now, imagine the prime minister taking a day off. Would Singapore collapse? Now, Ngee Ann Poly and NTU just help to further improve on SST. SST still has to run itself. The founder has to take care of it, not depend on others related to it.