BY TALIA WOOLLEY

A COCKTAIL bar in Sussex, called Gin Tub, has blocked mobile phone signals to encourage its customers to stop staring at their screens and to talk to each other instead.

Owner Steve Tyler blames social media for “killing pubs”. He has built a ‘Faraday cage’ into the walls and ceiling to stop the signals from passing through the building.

He says that his methods will force people to interact in the real world and help us to remember how to socialise.

This raises the big question of whether social media actually makes us less social.

In 2014 the average person spent 20.5 hours per week online. In 2015 it was found that young people, aged 16-24, spend more than 27 hours per week on the internet.

It has also been found that the average adult spends 2.5 hours a week online whilst on the move.

Although advanced technology allows us to do great things such as talk to friends and family who are thousands of miles away, give us directions when we are lost, and enable us to find any piece of information in a matter of seconds, there are arguments that new social media is in fact making us more antisocial.

Some say that social networking sites, like Facebook, are turning us into robots and we now no longer have to remember our friends’ birthdays.

Other platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are mostly public and we cultivate versions of ourselves that are well manicured and mostly false, meaning most of our followers or friends don’t really know who we are.

The irrational fear of being judged by others or the worry of how many ‘likes’ a post will receive has resulted in a generation of social networkers who lack social confidence in real life situations.