Relationships are a vital part of human beings, we need relationships in every aspect of our lives but there are always some factors that affect them. We live in a technology-dependent world where we give most of our time to social networking sites and that is really changing our relationships in both positive and negative ways.
Negative effects:
- When someone adds friends on social networks it doesn’t mean that you now have the closeness and intimacy you have with offline friends.
- Some scholars have explored that the creation of these networks affects our interpersonal relationships and may even restructure our thinking about our relationships.
- There are some feelings we can only feel in the real world, like the warmth of a person’s smile.
- Social media makes us self-centered which later affects our relationships with the people around us.
- Our online actions can have real life consequences by tarnishing our reputation, ruining our friendships, or isolating us from people we could have otherwise connected with.
- So used to promoting ourselves, we forget to engage in the world around us.
- Couples have hurtful experiences by using social media.
- Couples, friends, family, they all feel ignored when people use their social networks near them instead of giving them time.
- Many people get upset at something their friends or partners do online.
- We can’t express our feeling through texting or images.
- People get so hung up with their online friends they stop going out with their offline ones which makes them go away eventually.
- Online relationships are very common nowadays but we never know the person we are having relationship with can have that kind of relationships with how many people. Even if the partner is cheating on us we can never know.
- People get committed online and break up online; no sentiments of love are left in online relationships.
- Social media also allow couples to monitor each other’s activities, which may cause suspicion or hurt feelings.
Positive effects:
- Online friends may not mean much but they are often comforting background.
- Social media helps sustain tenuous or past friendships and prevent them from fading away.
- Research has found that “friend-ing” someone or responding to a request posted on someone’s wall lead people to feel a sense of attachment and perceive that others are reliable and helpful.
- Social media provides an alternative space for interaction that can more easily fit into a person’s busy schedule or interest area.
- Users in a committed relationship feel closer to their spouse or partner because of exchanges they have online.
- Users resolve arguments with their friends or partners online that they have difficulty resolving in person.
- Social networking sites make the distance seem smaller between friends and families.
- By breaking the boundaries between personal and private, we get to know better people we work with, get a better understanding about who they are and how they function which makes it easier to collaborate with them.
- When feeling lonely, a joke from a friend can always make you feel their presence even if they are far away.
There’s no denying the fact that the rise of social media has left a most significant mark on our society at large from starting revolutions to riots to awareness campaigns and so on, but more than anything it affected our relationships. It has the power to bring conflict and conceit, or the opportunity for connection and collaboration.
