In the contemporary world, interpersonal communication, overall, and dating, in particular, are changing concepts. Contrary to the traditional vision of a regular date filled with meaningful conversations, it is common to see a couple in a restaurant looking down on their phones without saying a word to each other. While this example becomes more prominent in day-to-day life, social relations, as many people know them, become scarce. Friends communicate via instant messaging, going to parents’ house appears unnecessary if one can call them using video chat, and dating has become an intricate game of technological slang. With the introduction of easy-to-access dating websites and apps like Tinder, modern romantic involvement is one click away. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that interpersonal communication skills change, evolve, or, sometimes, become impaired because of the excessive use of technology. Whether these changes are positive or negative remains a question. Regardless, they change how people talk, express themselves, and love. This paper will analyze three aspects of technological influence that changed interactions between romantic partners: lack of privacy, new signal communication, and since creation.
Technological Advances in Relationships: Facts and Statistics
It is crucial to understand the scale of how widespread technology is and to what extent the aspects mentioned above can impair interpersonal relationships. Without any doubt, the effect of technological progress differs among various groups of people. For instance, a 50-year old couple married for thirty years is less likely to be affected by technology than college students who have been dating for three months and met each other through a dating app. This age tendency is clearly shown in the study done by Pew Research. Lenhart and Duggan state that among all people who date, “88% use the internet, 71% use social networking sites, and 93% have a cell phone.” They also report the significant influence of technology on relationships (see fig. 1). Since phones and the Internet become more prominent in the lives of the majority of people, their use in dating is inevitable.
In modern courtship, many people claim that it is impossible to maintain a relationship without constant connection online. According to Reed et al., “When asked about digital media communication with their dating partners, most women (72.3%) and men (63.8%) sent or received text messages from their dating partner several times a day” (1558). These results suggest that young people’s relationships are tightly connected to social media, instant messaging, and the Internet overall. As a result, they are significantly more susceptible to the influence of technology, regardless of whether its effects are positive or negative.
Privacy and Conflict Mediation Skill
The first factor that affects interpersonal communication and conflict mediation skills in romantic relationships is the lack of privacy. The abundance of personal space invasion as a direct result of the use of technology has been connected to the lost perception of boundaries and intimacy, as well as dating violence and heightened aggression. For instance, Reed et al. suggest that romantically involved digital media users expect text conversations to be held with no delay, experience jealousy to their partner’s posts, and coerce partners to share sexual content (1558). This type of sensitive information exchange tends to blur boundaries between people’s personal spaces and creates opportunities for bullying in the future.
More specifically, personal photographs sent to a particular person could be distributed among the social circle to ridicule and mock the person who took them. Reed et al. confirm that a lack of privacy and breaches in trust often happen and then link such occurrences with a lack of interpersonal skills like conflict mediation. Relational conflicts are evident in “behaviors such as threatening to distribute embarrassing information about a dating partner using the Internet or a cell phone” (Reed et al. 1571). Lack of face-to-face contact urges people to take relational violence to the next step, and the easy access data sharing makes damaging the reputation of others a viable option.
Dating violence can also be supplemented by having access to the partner’s social media and email account, which contributes to having trust and confidence issues. Lenhart and Duggan indicate that more than half of long-term couples have shared a password with a partner. While entrusting personal information might serve as an indicator of active and robust connection, access to one’s social media contributes to the development of the controlling behavior. Reed et al. specify that “digital media give young people constant access to their dating partners and the ability to monitor their partner’s every move and activity” (1557). In a courtship where the partners supervise and control each other’s actions, social circle, and entertainment, the ability to trust and rely on one another diminishes, weakening the interpersonal engagement.
Signal Communication: Lost and Regained
The second way the Internet changes the interpersonal relationships is via adjusting the non-verbal cues to the new medium of online communication. In an environment where people avoid discussions in person and often communicate via messages, texts replace other person’s face and body language, and non-verbal cues of attraction are not accessible anymore. Gesselman et al. state that in one-on-one conversations, non-verbal behaviors that unconsciously signal attraction and romantic interest determine the success of the relationships on the initial bond creation stage. However, in contemporary dating, where potential couples interact via instant messaging just as much as in real life, the intentional and unintentional signals do not translate well to texting. As Gesselman et al. emphasize, the inability to communicate attraction in non-verbal cues and accurately translate these signals to the understanding of the partner’s intent leads many potential couples to a misunderstanding. These challenges can potentially diminish the likeliness of two people ending up in a successful relationship because they fail to interpret the interest and goals of each other correctly.
Therefore, the interpersonal skill of signal communication has to be adapted to social media and instant messaging reality. The impersonal and emotionless instant messaging provokes the conversationalists to seek an approach that will both detect compatibility and communicate emotions in a non-verbal way, similar to the body language in one-on-one chat. One of the ways that modern couples adapt to online signal interaction is through the use of emojis. Similar to non-verbal cues that reflect attraction or desire, emojis mirror the same emotions. Potential couples learn to recognize and reply to certain emojis that communicate romantic or sexual interest, which acts as a replacement of the same process that used to happen in real life. According to Gesselman et al., “Emojis can thus be used, at times strategically, to imbue CMC with expression in ways that satisfy fundamental human desires for effect, intimate communication, and interpersonal closeness.” However, since many people adapt to the emojis as a substitute for non-verbal communication online, the ability to recognize and act on the intentional body language of attraction in real life is gradually lost.
Disrupted Sense Creation: Impaired
The last interpersonal skill that is hindered by the excessive use of digital media is sense creation, which in turn disrupts one’s feeling of responsibility and the need for self-management. Sense creation “is expressed in the construction of an image of the world and an image of yourself in the world, based on value preferences of the individual, vital interests and motives” (Kudryavtseva and Rotanova). In simpler terms, the way an individual shapes the perception of self, creates a personal opinion, and controls the way it is publicly expressed is strongly determined by one’s communication competence and sense creation.
While sense creation is integral for self-management in face-to-face interactions, individuals who maintain their relationships online and meet other people through the Internet rarely exercise this interpersonal skill. Kudryavtseva and Rotanova examine the phenomenon that partners with constant online presence seem to have two personalities: their online persona and the one they use for real-life interactions. Contrary to the latter, the Internet personalities display more anger, self-manage themselves less, and fail in conveying their thoughts in an understandable manner (Kudryavtseva and Rotanova). These specificities in expressing one’s beliefs can eventually become universal in both digital media and real-life interactions. Therefore, technology significantly affects one’s ability to maintain a specific socially acceptable persona and the construct of society at all. Sense creation suffers alterations, and social media users become less proficient in conversating and arguments.
The impairment of the sense creation is evident from people’s romantic engagement and self-management, which can be the result of the self-disclosure that individuals fail to acknowledge and utilize. Kudryavtseva and Rotanova analyzed conversations of regular digital media users and concluded that due to the indifference towards self-disclosure, most of the verbal discussions now lack depth, appear superficial, and often contain banal truths, as well as communicate aggressiveness. The reason for such a detrimental effect might be that people get used to the online environment where they do not have to answer to the authority and face repercussions for their actions. Thus, they monitor their behavior less, disvaluing other partner’s comfort and opinion. As a result, the relationship modern people create can be more self-centered. On the other hand, the sharpness of the responses that lack self-management can disclose more personal and authentic replies because people talk and argue with no regard towards others. Thus, the absence of accountability for the actions might lead to more truthfulness in interactions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, although the extensive use of technology affects the interpersonal skills immensely in the areas of conflict mediation, signal language, and sense creation, modern daters are still able to benefit from these modifications. For instance, new signal language creation in the form of emojis appears to be a useful and more targeted tool to communicate attraction and interest as opposed to the vagueness of body language. However, it is essential to note that diminishing skills of aggression coping and self-management can hurt the quality of the relationships between people.
Works Cited
- Gesselman, Amanda N., et al. “Worth a Thousand Interpersonal Words: Emoji as Affective Signals for Relationship-Oriented Digital Communication.” Plos One, vol. 14, no. 8, 2019, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0221297.
- Kudryavtseva, Maria E., and Mira B. Rotanova. “The Problem of Sense Creation in Interpersonal Communication of Youth in the Digital Age.” 2018 IEEE Communication Strategies in Digital Society Workshop (ComSDS), 2018, doi:10.1109/comsds.2018.8354960.
- Lenhart, Amanda, and Maeve Duggan. “Couples, the Internet, and Social Media.” Pew Research Center Internet & Technnology, 2014.
- Reed, Lauren A., et al. “Snooping and Sexting.” Violence Against Women, vol. 22, no. 13, Sept. 2016, pp. 1556–1576, doi:10.1177/1077801216630143.