• Question: Do think social media has positively or negatively impacted upon an individual's ability to form relationships in the modern society?

    Asked by anon-204926 to James on 6 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: James Munro

      James Munro answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Woah, big question!

      Short answer: Yes. Haha, it has done both.

      If we take a look back to 2000 for a minute. The internet was in most homes, most kids were using it. There were chat rooms and forums like on this website. If you knew where to look, you could find forums on your favourite games, TV series, sport, etc. But there was no real place on the internet for showing yourself off. There were no websites where you had a big profile picture and posted updates on your real life in big detail. There were no websites like twitter where every celebrity had a feed of comments and news about themselves. It would be hard to imagine a president or prime minister updating society by posting tiny amounts of words on a website everyone would access.

      It is hard to imagine today’s internet without all of that. Today’s internet allows and encourages every people to try to be famous. Twitch is there to put your face on playing games, instagram puts your face and name on the quality of your pictures, twitter for your opinions and news, youtube for trying to make yourself a star on camera. There is a lot of evidence that higher social media usage is associated with an increase in narciccistic (obsession with yourself) traits and low self-esteem. For example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460316301095

      So frequent usage of social media seems to have many negative points – you are more likely to become more obsessed with yourself but to have lower self-esteem. That isn’t the full story though. Social media has so many positives. You can keep in touch with international friends, you can share images and jokes in a way that doesn’t work in person. Using text is very different to speaking with someone, and it is fairly unrealistic to imagine having a close relationship now-a-days where sending messages is optional.

      I realise I am writing a bit of an essay here, but I could go on for ages about this if there is any interest.

      Thanks 🙂

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