Introduction
In my opinion, the Internet communications, such as social media, emails, Google, Instagram, or WhatsApp, cause people to drift farther apart instead of being closed. It can be illustrated by the picture everyone can see: people on their cell phones all day and sometimes even all night. Sometimes, people get into car accidents as they are distracted by their cell phones. Despite the possibility that social apps can be used for being in connection all time, in practice, they devalue those connections between people. In that way, social media are causing people to drift farther apart and have less meaningful relationships.
Main body
With the rise of social media, many relationships have become broken down. People stop seeking close relationships because they tend to establish short-term ones based only on virtual conversations. According to Stefania (3–4), active Facebook usage leads to the development of negative relationship patterns. There is a preference for building relationships in social networks. However, those lack close contact, and both parties of such relationships feel anxiety and distrust toward each other. Still, people often prefer to text or smile even if they are in the same apartment. As a result, there is no time to talk when the family gets seated at the table because everyone is on social media.
Social networks break boundaries between people, which seems to be good, but in fact, it is not nice for relationships. For example, in the United States, 68% of adopted couples have at least one direct contact from their child’s birth family (Black et al. 319). The Internet creates opportunities for everyone to find almost everything by using Google or social network searches. The story which one can find in the article of Black et al. (307) is the story of Melanie, adopted mother, who received the Facebook friend request from her child’s birth father. She was confused and unsure what to do, and according to the study, such contacts usually lead to negative emotional reactions.
It is further connected with the theme of anxiety in social networks: partners often can use them to establish surveillance toward each other. Such abusive behavior roots in the inability to be sure of a partner in the distance of virtual relationships, and it is much more typical for anxious people (Stefania 7–8). Such relationships have low quality, as they are much more based on anxiety and embarrassment than on the feeling of closeness and intimacy.
People feel negative emotions and, falling into them, start to behave themselves worse, which leads to conflicts and misunderstandings. They often spend much time searching for the information connected with the partners to prevent infidelity and decrease anxiety, but it increases in practice (Stefania 7). Eventually, such behavior leads to hard social media dependency and decreases the quality of whole life quality. There are exceptions, I suppose, but in general, it is the trend I see. In that way, I think that the harm from social networks to relationships is severe and should be understood and reduced.
Today, people seem to be obsessed with the immediacy of information, which hinders knowledge acquisition. They constantly need information and usually find it immediately, based on their emotions, usually negative, such as anxiety; as they search for it, the level of anxiety actually increases (Stefania 7). Such people do not know how to look beyond the surface of the information, as they assume that everything is at hand and it is not necessary to dig deeper into any topic (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 02:15).
Constant emotional tension leads them to find more and more information, preventing them from deeper evaluation or proceeding of the received information. In addition, it makes them much less critical and more vulnerable to viral trends that appear on social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. In my opinion, this is an awful sign: people become obsessed with social media usage and lose the ability to understand what is happening around them.
Due to the very active use of social networks, people often lose communication skills. People are very consumed with their phones typing messages and leaving no time to think about them, that the quality of those communications is decreasing, similar to the relationship’s quality. Returning to the example with adoptive families, such contacts via Internet were infrequent, no more than several times a year, due to the embarrassment from both sides (Black et al. 310). People always have lower satisfaction from such contacts, and the frequency of communications usually changes nothing (Stefania 8). Thus, generally, if a person cannot use social networks consciously, it is more likely that they will cause harm, not benefit.
Conclusion
As I can conclude, social networks bring more harm than benefits to relationships, communication skills, and life quality. That is right that they allow us to be in touch everywhere and search for information much more quickly and effectively. Still, those tools are harmful before people do not learn how to use them consciously and properly. Unlimited access to the information results in losing the ability to filter this information and the dependency on it. The ability to be in touch everywhere leads to the rise of anxiety, development of negative behavior, conflicts, loss of trust, and, eventually, can break one’s life. In that way, it is more likely that social networks cause people to drift farther and have less meaningful relationships if they are used thoughtlessly.
Works Cited
Black, Kaitlin A., et al. “From Face-to-Face to Facebook: The Role of Technology and Social Media in Adoptive Family Relationships With Birth Family Members.” Adoption Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4, 2016, pp. 307–32. Crossref. Web.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” YouTube, uploaded by hardlynewsblog. 2010. Web.
Stefanita, Oana. “Facebook and Romantic Relationships – a Troubled Couple.” Romanian Journal of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy & Hypnosis, vol. 6, no. 1–2, 2019, pp. 1–12.