How can we live without social media today? We are in a world where our phones are the very first and last thing we see every morning and night, it's no big surprise social media can affect our relationships, both online and offline. Social media has had one of the deepest effects on society. It is useful to all classes of people, but on certain occasions, it has proven to be harmful. In the United States today, you’re statistically more likely to use social media than not — by a lot. Approximately 77 percent of all Americans have a social media profile of some kind.
Social media platforms enable people to make new friends and find new interests. It also enables them to associate with an enormous gathering of individuals who offer similar interests as theirs. People who are not very comfortable with face-to-face interactions or who suffer from social anxiety usually fail to make good friends. Social media can assist give them a genuine opportunity to hide their shyness and restraints to make it easier for them to create new friends. Social media has likewise made it feasible for individuals from various countries to create powerful relationships. You can associate with people from different countries and know more about them, their culture, and their way of life. Social media has made it possible for an individual to share his/her updates instantly with other people. Social media websites allow an individual to create a profile that would perfectly describe him and show the individual’s preferences. This is incredibly helpful in knowing whether you would be well-suited for that person or not. Social media also helps you to network in an effective manner from the bounds of your home.
Using social media nowadays has made it simpler for everybody to do everything really. It has made it very easy in a wide range of settings, for example, workplace, school, home, and everywhere else. Perhaps one of the most important advantages of social media would need to be the way we communicate with others. When communicating through social media, you can send and receive messages at any time and anywhere from anyone as long as you are connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi or 4G. There would be no need for payphones and landlines when everyone today has a smartphone. Social media is incredible for remaining connected with family and friends and sharing intriguing and significant parts of our lives. It keeps us connected over the world and causes us to find our friends or relatives that we had not spoken to in a long time. The ability to have the option to speak with others from various parts of the world is stunning. Communication between people that have long-distance relationships was very hard without social media because they would not be able to talk to each other as frequently and easily. Now social media has provided many ways for them to stay in touch. You can have live video conversations with multiple people in any country such as Skype at any time.
We live in a period where feelings are openly shared and posted on social media, notwithstanding the conclusion of the feeling shared. Sharing our feelings and emotions with each other helps create and build stronger interpersonal bonds between each other, which starts relationships. When we get together with a friend and disclose to them we are feeling awful, we are opening up to them in a way that empowers them to open up accordingly. This starts a reciprocal procedure that unites us closer together and makes friendships stronger. The procedure can likewise enable our feelings to return to their ordinary state when they are out of balance. This isn't because discussing our emotions is soothing, but because we get feedback, support, and validation from the people we converse with.
Regardless of the popularity of social media platforms and the way quickly, we’ve inserted them into our lives, there’s a remarkable loss of clear statistics approximately how they affect us, in my opinion: our behaviors, our social relationships, and our mental health. Research has related the use of social media to despair, anxiety, poorer sleep quality, lower self-esteem, and inattention— frequently in teens and youngsters. The writer Leslie Shore stated: “Research shows that, on average, we spend two or more hours a day on social media”. Also, Jordyn Young, a co-author of the paper and a senior at Pennsylvania College stated: “What we found overall is that if you use less social media, you are actually less depressed and less lonely, meaning that the decreased social media use is what causes that qualitative shift in your well-being”.
In a way, social media pulls us apart. Take, for example, family relationships. Family gatherings now establish a get-together of family members that only sit silently using their smartphones, hardly talking with each other face to face. Instead, it’s ironic how they focus more on sharing a picture of themselves with their family members than actually participating in this event itself, but nowadays this has become a norm and an ordinary sight. Social media has nearly destroyed family life in so many ways. We prefer to update our followers with what is happening in our life at that moment on social media than converse with our siblings or parents.
It’s very likely that you have been with a friend recently and were trying to fight for their attention while they were just scrolling through their Instagram or posting on Facebook, and you would feel ignored or lonely. Antonia Hall, a psychologist, relationship expert, and the author of 'The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life' says: “We're forgetting how to just BE with one another, engaging and interacting without taking pictures, posting, and checking social media”. It's becoming too common to disregard the humans around us in actual life, opting rather to provide our interest to social media streams. You can easily get carried away while using social media since it is very addicting, therefore hurting your relationship with that person, so it is very important to know what time is appropriate to use social media and what time is not.
These are just a few of the ways social media affects our relationships described in this essay. On the one hand, they really brought us together, but on the other hand, they pulled us apart, clearly damaging our relationship rather than strengthening it. There is no denying both the positive and negative effects on a person, but each of us must make a choice to use it effectively. So, in my opinion, it is best that we focus on how to make the best use of social media and not let it destroy our relationships.