Has Social Networking Killed Relationships?
Like many other college students, I have done my fair share of procrastination via Netflix. One show that captured my attention was How I Met Your Mother, the popular friends-based sitcom. The show follows the lives and plights of a group of young people living in New York City, particularly Ted Mosby, who is searching for his soulmate.
I recently watched an episode in which Ted explains that since the creation of smartphones and social media, typical conversation has gone by the wayside. The episode shows people with social network pages floating around them, displaying their personal information in public. Ted attempts to go on a date with a woman under the agreement that neither of them will do any internet research about the other in an attempt to preserve the mystery of dating. He soon finds out that he and his date have nothing to talk about, supposedly because they did not know how to steer the conversation based on social media.
This episode, in conjunction with the concepts we have discussed in class so far, got me thinking about the role of social networking on relationships. In some ways, it can be fun to see which mutual friends we might have with another person on Facebook or be able to “look a person up,” almost like an electronic way to induce triadic closure. However, when looking at the phenomenon more closely, I find that it becomes somewhat disconcerting. Although we often provide much of this information voluntarily on social networks, these pages give away much of the details that we might share with someone in getting to know them. Like Ted, we might run out of things to talk about at a meal, for example, even just after thinking about what information might be on a person’s social media.
In an interview with Time Magazine, author Kim Stolz, who wrote the book Unfriending My Ex about the influence of technology on relationships, even thinks that social media both leads to more breakups as well as making them occur faster. She explains that social media brings out the human tendency to be impulsive. This seems to me like a way to bypass a lot of the meaningful aspects of forming relationships. Impulse provokes us to jump to conclusions, which can be harmful when it comes to interacting with other people.
Networks have extreme power to connect the world and even create relationships between people who might never come in contact with one another otherwise. But they also have the power to hurt the way we interact with others and harm potential relationships and connections. Technology has brought this concept into our everyday lives, affecting the way we think about and perceive other people. It might be fun for us to want to “friend” someone we see who has many mutual friends with us (again, like electronic triadic closure), when in reality we might not know anything about that person.
So, I would suggest that we be conscious about what information we provide on social media as well as try to perceive people outside of their electronic profiles. It might be healthy for us all to take a digital break and try to distance ourselves from our networks, no matter how beckoning they may be.
http://time.com/2917916/kim-stolz-how-social-media-is-ruining-our-relationships/