Sunday, March 2, 2014

Friendship and Social Media

By: Sarah Rafiq

Social Media has become a part of our everyday lives. We use social media to interact with each other in various ways such as Facebook, twitter and Instagram. But is our use of social media affecting our personal relationships? Friendship is something people need to have to live a happy and normal life style. Social media has played a big part in helping people keep in contact with friends and family through media outlets. But there are some down falls to social media, people interact face to face less than before.

This actually makes us lonelier because we have less human interactions. A study done by the University of Michigan stated that the more people spent on Facebook the lonelier they felt. University Of Michigan Study. If People feel lonelier when using social media then what can we expect from the future? People will continue to use social media as an outlet of contacting one another. People will have less and less human interaction. This will cause a problem in the professional world because people will lack the skills they need to build personal relationships with people.

Adapted from www.dailymail.co.uk
I believe people will begin to have less real life friends and have more cyber friends. It will be really hard to build those friendships with real life people because we won’t be conferrable any more being face to face with someone. This could cause even more loneliness because people will start to build less real friendships.

The loneliness issue could also take another turn in the future. People could become less likely to use social media because of the disconnect from the real world. There are still people today who prefer meeting someone and building a friendship rather than contacting each other through social media outlets. This sense of loneliness could turn people off from social media all together and cause people to once again interact the old fashion way.

I guess were just going to have to wait and see what happens in the future. 
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1 comment:

  1. PersonalReationshipsSocialMedia2014March 5, 2014 at 5:49 PM

    Hi Sarah,

    I enjoyed reading your blog about friendship and social media. I think it’s true and in this day and age, we can definitely find ourselves with larger online social circles, yet feel even more isolated and lonely. I myself have been in situations where I’m interacting with friends for a few hours in the comfort of our homes, yet after the novelty of instant chat where’s off, I’d much rather be outside socializing with people and having a mutual interactive experience in a tangible world. I found this video by Shimmy Cohen on The The Innovation of Loneliness, that much like your article discuses how with an increase of social networking, people with more online friends you feel lonelier, because unlike real interaction, online friendship are ‘fake’ because your editing your posts, your pictures, it’s not instant interactions, it’s not a natural form of communication.

    In the future, I don’t think that our relationships with face-to-face interaction will become less important; as I think as social creatures we crave this. Although I do think that we will continue to have online relationships, as well as the technology will try to blur the lines of in person interaction vs. cyber interaction.

    From Marcin Sajda

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