I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You: Reflection
Social Media began affecting our communication and relationships as early as 1969 when the first internet service provider become available to U.S. universities. In 2002, Friendster, the first social media website available to the U.S. was created and gained over 3 million members in just over 3 months. One year later, MySpace launched. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a 24-year-old Harvard student, created Facebook, an online social networking service. This service was originally a way for students to interact. Today it is the world’s largest social networking service and allows over a billion users to connect though posting photos, sharing links, and comments which all appear on a “News Feed” that blasts out this information to all your virtual friends. For the current generation, this new way of communication is facilitating the act of never losing contact with anyone they have ever met. It also allows anyone on this platform to create new relationships with people they are interested in connecting with via internet.
In Clive Thomas’s “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close To You”, he discusses how Social Media has both positive and negative effects on relationships with friends and acquaintances. Thomas puts a large focus on the website Facebook. He discusses the pros and cons of the privacy level, ambient awareness, and effects on “weak tie” relationships that websites like Facebook create. He explains how this constant online communication, ambient awareness, gives you a sense of someone’s thoughts, actions, and experiences without actually being present. Thomas uses creditable sources such as Zeynep Tufekci, former assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland...
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...en you meet someone for the first time who you befriended online first, it really takes away the getting to know you step. You already know where they are from, their age, hobbies, beliefs, ext. You don’t have physicially talk to someone and pick their brain anymore, you just need to look up their blog. Relationships built from ambient awareness make you feel a new level of intimacy, but is it really intimacy or is it just something that makes you feel a little less lonely?
Asking if someone is ambiently aware is somewhat like asking “Do you have a facebook?”
Side Note:
Humans created social media, so we can’t blame social media for our participation in it. It is a completely participatory event. We are the ones that make up social media. So it is unfair of us to blame it as an entity, because we participate and we are the creators of the media that we blame.
...er-relationship through the lens and personal experience of the author Meghan Daum. After being exposed to the ups and downs that left a deep scar in the author, she concludes that the physical world stands as an obstacle in front of online-relationships. Overall, the author did a good job in presenting her idea and supporting it using personal experience and detailed descriptions. Yet she fails when restricting her support to her personal encounters and lacked power due to the many logical fallacies presented earlier such as her constant generalization, emotional appeals and finally the lack of counter argument. In the end, the reader is left with questions concerning virtual love, the physical world, and the ultimate desire to attain happiness since it’s quite hard to imagine that someone would be convinced with the idea of Daum simply due to her own experience.
Dr. Marry Marrow has syntheses her findings about Facebook and wrote, “Social media; staying connected.” She mentions that Facebook can bring happiness when you actively connected to our beloveds. Additionally, Facebook gives opportunities to health care as mean to communicate and to instruct communities (Marrow para 3). Social media like Facebook can enhance the relationships between us with organizations. Marry discloses, “There is a certain beauty of staying connected with loved ones and friends, favorite sports teams and performers via social media” (para 2). In other words, she presumes that affixing through Facebook gives off pleasure with one 's family, friends, sports team and performers. Moreover, she introduces that being active on Facebook can give you joyful moments and you won’t be lonely, and nurses can connect with their patients and embrace positive relationships with each
In the article “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche, the author tries to show that Facebook impacts on society in the various ways. Moreover, the purpose of this article is to convince the readers that they should really connect to each other like face-to-face contact rather than spending time online the social media. Marche states that “Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships, but it doesn’t create them either” (Marche 608). The author’s audience would be middle-aged adults and middle class in May 2012 that buy and read about the social media because they might be up sad of their life. He also discusses that social network is making us lonely, or if lonely people are addicted to the Internet. However, he states social network is “merely a tool” (608), and we can choose how to use them. Marche sounds very cynical. He is an analyst, but his article is not clear enough. The author’s situation is so complicated because he uses too much examples and stories. Stephen Marche in “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” is not effective in using pathos, connotative languages, tone and emotions to convince the reader that they should really connect to each other face-to-face rather than spending time online.
However, they can just as easily convince users that they are missing out on having a social life. Marche quotes a woman named Moira Burke, who has conducted studies on Facebook interaction (34). Bruke claims that the way in which the site is used is the greatest factor in determining if it increases the loneliness of users or not, stressing the importance of actually communicating with people one knows personally instead of posting about one’s own activities or simply clicking “like” on the others’ posts. If a Facebook user simply sits back and watches the activity of others without interacting with them in any way referred to by Burke as “one-click communication” and “passive consumption”, it could result in feelings of
Soley, this false sense of connection means that people know about others without actually getting to know others. Online communication has certainly impacted the way the world works because there is a decrease in the amount of face to face conversation and confrontation, which no doubt, lowers the social skills of newer generations. This article shows the common realization that multiple people falsely make when on social media, and it states that, “Somehow it is important for you to know that your “friend” Ally, whom you haven’t actually seen in 30 years, just went for a walk and somehow it is important that she tell you- and 234 other folks” (Bernhard 5). The human brain works in a way that means if we know things about other people’s lives, we feel close to them. Somehow that process fosters a sense of connection for both people
People have the fundamental desire to maintain strong connections with others. Through logic and reasoning, Sherry states, “But what do we have, now that we have what we say we want, now that we have what technology makes easy?”(Turkle). Face to face conversations are now mundane because of the accessibility to interact at our fingertips, at free will through text, phone calls and social media. Belonging, the very essence of a relationship has now become trivial.
Advances in technology have complicated the way in which people are connecting with others around them and how it separates people from reality. In “Virtual Love” by Meghan Daum, she illustrates through the narrator 's point of view how a virtual relationship of communicating through emails and text messages can mislead a person into thinking that they actually have a bond with a person whom they have stuck their ideals onto and how the physical worlds stands as an obstacle in front of their relationship when the couple finally meets. In comparison, the article … While Daum and X discuss that technology pushes us apart and disconnects us from the physical world, they evoke a new light into explaining how technology creates the illusion of making
"We believe that more relationships provide more opportunity." (Source 2). It has gotten into the minds of avid Internet users that the more people you have retweeting you, liking your pictures, or your status, the more social you become. How many of these followers are actually their friends? The more notifications you have on social media does not equal the amount of friends you have. It does not make you social, it just makes you another active user on social media. Receiving notifications does not help you make friends. Even just having a little chat with people online does not mean you are friends. More relationships with people online do not provide any opportunity of creating any real friendships. Friendship are not created by liking someone's status or retweeting someone's picture. ". . . online Americans tend to have 644 ties on average." (Source 1). There is more focus on making connections, than making real friends. A casual conversation does not automatically create a real friendship. Online you can create a larger group of connections, but this does not make you social. The social ties that the internet offers do not create a real bond between people. Social media connections do not help you create a real relationship with another person. More social ties do not mean you are interacting with more people, it just means you have connections with a larger group. I don’t agree with the belief that
Social networking can connect strangers across the world. As the evolution of communication continues, technology progresses and social networking grows. Social networks like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have grown to have billions of users. In fact in today’s society, it is necessary or nearly expected to use one if not all of these technological communication networks. The increasing use of social networking has had both a negative and positive effect on communication in relationships. The purpose of this literary analysis is to answer if social networks are helpful or harmful to relationships.
and family, and also “meet like-minded people” ( Metz, par. 1). In some cases, business people such as Ron West, claim that he uses Facebook “to become acquainted with new customers”( par. 8). Yes, these types of websites are great tools to stay in touch with old classmatesand faraway family members. It is a great source of communication, but there is always a con to every pro. Even though users are connecting with others, users of social networks never know exact...
In this day and age, many individuals simply cannot go without some sort of socialization. Specifically speaking, most participate in online social networking sites. The most popular and used one is commonly known as Facebook. Facebook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. By 2007, Facebook had over 21 million users, adding up to 1.6 billion page views every single day. The typical user spends over twenty minutes per day on Facebook and two thirds of the users log in every day at least once. It is not questionable as to why many people have a Facebook account. Facebook is generally efficient, easy for socialization, and not difficult to manage. Most organizations are affiliated with Facebook, as “almost 22,000 organizations had Facebook directories,” as of November 2006. A year after that in 2007, Facebook was named the seventh most popular website (Ellison 1). However, with anything well known, many oppose to using Facebook and hold criticism against the popular network. There are many flaws in the website and the relationships it starts online. Facebook is risking dangerous activities, ignoring privacy laws, and demeaning healthy socialization.
Life in the modern world is difficult now because of technology has taken up most of our time. It can make us feel lonely and disconnect with reality. As we spend much time on the internet, such as web surfing or instant messaging, we lack with our social skills because we don’t know how to interact with people. People who are “socially anxious” and “lonely” tends to focus more on the internet by making “relationships with others” and slowly interact with people on the web but we don’t socialize with people in our life (Tyler 200-201).
Marche, Stephen. “Is Facebook Making us Lonely? (Cover story)”: 8 (10727825) 309.4 (2012): 68. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.
Although social networks allow for more conversation among more people, they are also deceitful mechanisms that limit face-to-face interactions and possibly ruin the true meaning of friendship. They allow for more conversation by showing who is available to talk. This gives people the freedom to talk to whoever, whenever, which expands relationships. Unfortunately, over usage of social networking sites can limit the amount of time that people have to intermingle in person. They become deceitful mechanisms that take away from two or more people’s face-to-face time together. Fortunately, limiting the amount of time spent on social networking sites can lead to the perfect relationship: one with just the right amount of time spent interacting in person as well as miles away from each other.
Nowadays, we are living in the “ technology world”, digital’s century, science and technology are being devolopped like a rain-storm, people try their best effect to serve for human’s infiniti demand. Internet in general and social network in particular are exceedingly funtional tools. Indeed, with over 1.3 billion active users in June,2014 ( Wikipedia), there is no suprise that Facebook has been becoming a leading social network in the world, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected” – CEO of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg (google). Facebook truthly brought many useful; however, it is still “ a double-edged sword”.