The Effects Of Social Media On Relationships

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Social media began affecting our communication and relationships as early as 1969 when the first internet service provider became available to universities in America. According to the University of North Carolina, 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. Facebook was created in 2004 by a 24-year-old Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. UNC confirms it was initially a way for Harvard students to interact; Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network with a billion users connecting though photos, links, and comments on a streaming News Feed. News Feed is a community page that shows the top stories of everyone on your Facebook. Now a billion people of today’s generation can interact with nearly everyone that have ever met. Services such as Facebook allow users to create and maintain relationships with people that they wouldn’t other wise keep in touch with. (Insert example)
Clive Thompson discusses the positive and negative effects of social media on various relationships in his article, “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close To You.” Thompson explains the multiple pros and cons of the privacy level, ambient awareness, and effects on “weak tie” relationships that websites like Facebook in particular create. According to Glenn Platt on the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies ambient awareness is a term frequently used by social scientists to explain the peripheral social awareness that has become increasingly relevant in the twenty first century. Thompson argues that this constant online communication gives people the ability to peer inside peoples’ thoughts, actions, and ex...

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... limited privacy these websites provide, the ambient awareness that brings a whole new meaning to knowing someone, and how although our “weak ties” may be stronger, our relationships often suffer as a result. “I Am So Totally, Digitally Close to You” made me realize how much this social media craze is affecting our population and myself personally.
At the end of the day social media is a completely participatory event. Humans created social media and their engagement is voluntary. It’s dependent on our activity, without our participation it wouldn’t thrive. It is unfair of us to lay blame on it as an entity for our loss of privacy, digitally intimacy, and weak relationships because we created and make use of the social media websites. The majority of people have chosen to embrace social media and although the benefits are high, social networking has its challenges.

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