Social Media Is Killing Your Friendships
https://www.healthline.com/health/how-social-media-is-ruining-relationships#1
“Social Media Is Killing Friendships.” That’s the title of an article by Jennifer Chesak that appeared in Healthline. While the article does say some positive things about social media and relationships, it is mostly critical of the effect it has on people and their friendships. Chesak points out that social media has become an ever increasing part of everyone’s life as people are “spending an average of more than two hours a day on social media.” But while people tell themselves that being online helps them stay connected, “we’re unknowingly draining our social energy for in-person interactions.”
This conclusion may not be anything new, echoing what many others in pop culture have said, but what makes this article particularly interesting is a study it cites by R.I.M. Dunbar. According to Dunbar, while social media allows us to have more connections and a larger network, it ends up draining our energy for real-person interactions because our brains can “only handle about 150 friends, including family members.” His conclusions were based on conducting brain scans of people’s neocortex, “the part of the brain that manages relationships.” Of course, many people have a lot more than 150 friends just on Facebook. The danger, according to Dunbar, is that the abundance of online friendships ends up hurting our ability to maintain strong and meaningful relationships in the real world. The article also argues that “Social media is never the prescription for staving off boredom…your favorite people are.” Many people use social media to prevent loneliness, but it can have the opposite effect, actually ruining their relationships in real life and making them even more lonely.
There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn from this article to what we learned in class. Essentially, this article is saying that we are all the ego’s of our own network and we have many strong ties and many more weak ties. Social media is turning many of these strong ties into weak ties and I would argue into no ties at all. As Dunbar suggests, many of our so-called friends on Facebook are more like acquaintances and, I would further argue, are not even acquaintances at all, no closer to you than some random celebrity you follow on Instagram. This would suggest that people have no strong or weak tie to many of their friends on, for example, Facebook. This would make sense because, as the article and Dunbar’s research point out, social media can actually lead to feelings of loneliness. People think they have this huge support and friendship network, but, in reality, social media has not strengthened any of their connections, it’s just an illusion. They think they are the ego of some huge network with a lot of strong and weak ties, but, in reality, one’s network is probably not that large, containing a few strong ties and far more weak ties. More importantly, many nodes and groups that you are aware of, you don’t know well enough in real life to form even a weak edge. Maybe you know about them via a local bridge and that’s why you think you are connected to them, but, again in reality, you have no edge to them at all. In a lot of ways, social media has even reduced people’s strong connections and that could also be a major reason social media causes depression as many people are not strengthening their close friendships as much of their energy is wasted online with people they have very weak ties with. As we have discussed in class, weak ties can be very beneficial in connecting you to other groups that have strong connections with each other, but social media seems to trick people into thinking they have far more weak ties than they actually do.