Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Relationships

Ever since we started carrying smartphones around with us, we have had social media become even more common in our lives. We sometimes wonder when we speak with our friends if being connected all the time like this is good or bad for our relationships. Does social media make us more connected or less connected? This study looks at two types of connectivity. The first type is connectivity in the form of relationships that we have with others we interact with in real life, and connectivity in the form of actual virtual connections needed for online crowdfunding for example. There are both positive and negative effects of social media on relationships, so the purpose for this essay is to examine the articles and compare the effects of social media on relationships and with achieving goals in a social setting.

Today, social media is almost everywhere we look. They make video games that we play daily on our phones. They allow us to see the activities of all our connections and categorize our posts with hash tags and keywords. It seems that everywhere we look someone has their phone out and is either chatting with a friend, texting, playing a game or some music. You may also notice that these people do not always greet others as they walk by, or a child may blindly follow their mother or father with their nose in their phone. Sometimes you may even see a group of friends hanging out with each of them doing something on their own phone not even talking to the others.

It would not be difficult to guess from this behavior that social media might be bad for the strength of relationships that we have with our friends or people in our lives. Early research even suggested that computer-based communication and interactions shifting from face-to-face to text based would create a poor communication environment. Haythornthwaite also notes that the early research believed that communication would be full of misunderstandings, flaming, and antisocial behavior. Haythornthwaite goes on to explain that some people may see the internet and blame it for disconnecting people from local interactions, family interactions, and drawing them into relationships with unknown and sometimes even unconfirmed identities. However, the research shows the opposite and that the benefits of online communication through social media are present and include keeping up connections with family and friends while away, satisfying needs not met locally, and making connections to others who have similar interests. The benefits do exist for social media.

So how does social media affect our teens and young people? We know that sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms for teens . We also know that 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say that they spend time online constantly. In the study they asked the teens themselves and it turns out teens have a mixed view on social media and its effects. There are many who say it helps them connect with others, but there are concerns raised over bullying. Some teens in the study saw the same benefits that Haythornthwaite saw in their study such as the ability to stay in touch with family members over long distances while about 45% had no opinion one way or the other on whether or not social media was good or bad Even after they graduate more and more colleges and universities are using social media to keep in touch with alumni. Social media is very popular in the life of a teen in the United States.

Social media can also be beneficial by helping others connect for the purposes of gaining publicity for a cause or a specific purpose such as crowdfunding or for income. In this case they looked at social media and its effect on the success of a crowdfunding campaign. Raising funds is the most important part of crowd funding. Without the crowd you have no funds. Using social media as a tool, they promoted the campaign and tried to predict the successful outcome which worked 76.7% of the time. This proves that social media and their connections can be put to good use. This model can be applied to charities to help them raise money for their crowdfunding.

Interpersonal Relationships

As mentioned above, social media is everywhere and early research suggested that it might be bad for our interpersonal relationships. In her paper, Haythornthwaite describes a system of strong and weak ties that is a type of exchange or interaction known as a social network relation. If you are a pair of people who maintain one or more types of relations you are said to have a tie. There are two types of ties that she describes. There are the weak ties, which are ties that we have with people who are not our close friends and those people are known to have different experiences and information. Then there are the strong ties which are our close friends and family that we have similar experiences with and share the same information. The study that Haythornthwaite did looked at these two types of relationship ties and added social media in as a factor. They asked who talked to whom about what and which media they used to do it.

One group they looked at was distance learners. At the end of the program the students were asked how often they engaged in certain activities like classwork or socializing. They then went and looked at social media use for the group and the students were asked to rate their relationship ties as close friendship, friendship, work-only tie or just another member of the class tie. For the colocated research group, Cerise, the number of relationships that students kept and the number of times that students communicated with another student increased based on the closeness of the reported tie. According to those findings, relationships that included strong ties and emotional and social support were found to use more means of communication not less. They found that more strongly tied pairs used more types of social media.

Today, there are always new media apps coming out and it is hard to keep up with everything. Social media is no exception. In order to gauge how social media affects teens and their relationships we have to understand how they use social media. About half, or 51%, of teens in the United States ages 13 to 17 say that they still use Facebook. That is much lower than Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat. Another big change for teens since the last survey was conducted on this topic in 2014-2015 is that about 95% of them can now claim to have access to a smartphone with 45% of them saying they are online almost constantly. This means they have easy and almost constant access to social media in many forms.

As stated above the study revealed that teens have a mixed view of how social media impacts their lives. About 31% said that social media had a mostly positive effect on their lives. They used reasons like connecting with friends and family, easier to find news and information, and self expression as reasons to support this. On the other side, about 24% of teens believed that social media is mostly negative. They used examples like bullying, lack of in-person contact, and peer pressure as examples for why social media can have a negative influence on their lives. Finally, about 45% of teens said they did not believe social media had a positive or negative effect at all. The majority of teens are indifferent on social media and its effects.

Social Media in Professional Relationships

Today, it is clear that we have a high level of connectivity. Many people are building on relationships that they already have at work and addressing important relationship building to make the business stronger. According to Schmidt, Lelchook, and Martin there are about 58% of participants that had social connections with coworkers, and about 25% of participants in a recent Pew Research Center survey were Facebook friends with their supervisor. There is evidence to suggest that people are using social media to connect their professional networks as well as their private lives.

With a paper survey that participants had to fill out, they selected 327 unionized employees that worked in retail. They were asked for their total number of social media connections, the total coworker social media connections that they had, the percentage of those coworker connections, level of perceived organizational support, and asked to rate organizational spontaneity. Organizational spontaneity has different meanings depending on the level you are looking at. For this study they talk about the group level which can influence group norms, interdependence, and goals and the organizational level which can influence organizational structure, culture, company policies, and reward systems.

The results were not very surprising. The study predicted that the percentage of coworker social media connections related positively to their perceived level of organizational support. Schmidt, Lelchook, and Martin also predicted that the level of organizational spontaneity would also be related positively to the total number of coworker social media connections. This turned out to have a positive relation and is supported. The researchers believe is evidence to support that coworker social media connections relate to important workplace concepts.

Social Media in Romantic Relationships

With the rise of online dating it was not long before we would think that social media would play a role in dating and our romantic lives just like every other part of our personal lives that we give them access to. Just because Facebook is no longer popular with teens, does not mean that Facebook still isn’t the most popular social media networking site in the world. It has 1.13 billion users that visit it per day. According to Langlais and Seidman there have been several studies that have shown that some people start romantic relationships on social media like Facebook.

Langlais and Seidman used focus groups to find out why people use Facebook like this. They identified a process where the young adult sees someone that interests them somewhere in the real world, then they try to find that person on Facebook. Next, they send a friend request and once they are accepted, they browse the person’s Facebook page. After that they ask for the phone number and then they begin texting and eventually spend time together. Then it circles back to social media where they post on each other’s Facebook pages and finally go on a formal date. They do it all because the results demonstrated that it was a way for people to privately learn more about the other person without having to speak face-to-face.

This study revealed that while many use Facebook to start romantic relationships extraversion, agreeableness, and openness were not predictors of motivation to use social media for the start of a romantic relationship. Facebook does provide opportunity for self-disclosure and that can promote the beginning of romantic relationships.

Conclusion

With social media being everywhere in our daily lives we can’t help but wonder if it is good or bad for our personal relationships or connectivity in general. Despite early research suggesting that social media may be damaging to our relationships we learned that the stronger the ties that people experienced the more media they used. Our communication may have some misunderstandings and some antisocial behavior but overall the research points to stronger social connections thanks to social media.

Teens are more connected to the internet than ever. With 95% having access to smartphones and 45% saying they spend time online constantly, it is very important that we look at this group and social media’s effect on them. Most of them, 45%, did not believe social media was good or bad, and the rest were split between bad and good with supportive reasons for both.

Overall, social media is creating more connections and enabling those who know how to use it to be able to raise funds for projects or charities, keeping families connected over long distances, and building strong ties that are just as valuable as face-to-face relationships, even romantic ones.

Works Cited

• Anderson, M., & Jiang, J. (2018). Teens, Social Media & Technology. Pew Research Center, 31. Retrieved from Public Service Alliance.
• George, J. M., & Jones, G. R. (1997). Organizational Spontaneity in Context. Human Performance, 153-170.
• Haythornthwaite, C. (2005). Social Networks and Internet Connectivity Effects. Information, Communication & Society, 125-147.
• Kaur, H., & Gera, J. (2017). Effect of Social Media Connectivity on Success of Crowdfunding Campaigns. Information Technology and Quantitative Management, 768-774.
• Langlais, M., & Seidman, G. (2019). Relationship Initiation on Facebook: Understanding the Role of Personality. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 17-34.
• Schmidt, G. B., Lelchook, A. M., & Martin, J. E. (2015). The Relationship Between Social Media Co-worker Connections and Work Related Attitudes. Computer in Human Behavior, 440-445.
• Wilson, C.D. (2012). Making Connections Social Media Meets Higher Education.