Introduction and Thesis: Yes, using technology is a great way to meet new people. Yes, it allows old friends to link back up, new friends to be made, and finding your soulmate is much more possible with this vast web of possibilities at one’s’ disposal. However, there are many things that are never truly established physically and emotionally. This leads to a psychological loss of development, that allows a person to truly feel the emotion, passion, and fire of a real relationship. Love just happens, you can not generate love. The Digital Age has led our generation to a more lonely and socially isolated environment, due to the lack of actual face-to-face interaction and emotional attachment.

Body: “The recent dramatic increase in media use has been accompanied by a rising concern that interactions with media may be replacing face-to-face interactions, resulting in lower quality social interactions and impaired psychosocial functioning.”(Becker, Alzahabi, and Hopwood)

-replacing face-to-face interactions doesn’t allow for actual emotional development and attachment to occur, which leads to impaired psychosocial functioning, distrust, social anxiety

“The difficulties with social interaction observed in major depressive disorder may, at least in part, be due to an altered ability to correctly interpret emotional stimuli and mental states.” Using social media as a main source of social interactions doesn’t allow for true social development between humans, therefore the psychological mind of the being doesn’t recognize emotions “correctly”.(Weightman, Air, Baune)

-due to social media interactions, our psychological mind may interpret emotions and other social interactions differently or “incorrectly”

“Social media puts an interesting lens on the creation of our digital selves in addition to being the catalyst for drastically changing the way people interact in today’s society.” (Baruth) Since 1997, when SixDegrees was created, the first social media website, there have been thoughts of how humans would react to one another through the usage of social medias. Would artificial feelings develop, would social networking itself grow, and would relationships develop the same way.

-through the usage of social media, relationships have altered in many ways, such as how they begin, how they develop, how they cooperatively interact with one another, and unfortunately how they end.

Refutations and Conclusion: “Electronic communication channels (phone and texting) were related to positive relationship qualities, however, once accounting for attachment, only moderated effects were found. Interactions indicated texting was linked to more positive relationships for highly avoidant (but not less avoidant) participants. Additionally, email use was linked to more conflict for highly avoidant (but not less avoidant) participants. Finally, greater use of a SNS was positively associated with intimacy/support for those higher (but not lower) on attachment anxiety.”(Morey, Gentzler, Creasy, Oberhauser, Westerman) This study illustrates how attachment can help to explain why the use of specific technology-based communication channels within romantic relationships may mean different things to different people, and that certain channels may be especially relevant in meeting insecurely attached individuals’ needs.

It mentions the increase in the use of social media which provides a faceless, disembodied environment for communication and social interaction. “It presents the opposing effects of the Internet such as limiting close family ties and at the same time widening affinity-based ties with people of the same race, interest and circumstance”.(Tufekci) The use of the Internet to connect and not isolate oneself from society is suggested. It also eludes to the idea that the internet is not a lonely place externally, but tracking through the human’s’ internal mind and thought process, there are two completely different meanings of loneliness through social media usage.

I understand that using social media websites and apps allows for many more various opportunities to interact and communicate with other individuals throughout the world. I know that there are websites like “Match.com” that have very high success rates for people meeting and actually falling in love and developing a marriage. Yes these humans develop “relationships” with one another through these interactions. Although, some of these websites do not tell you about the amount of failed relationships ratio to successful ones that occur on this website; there are just as high rates of failed relationships. However, there is never a true real-life social attachment established. No “true” emotions are truly instilled into the relationship. This leads to tons of social problems with the relationship, such as social anxiety; this is because no real base of trust was built in the beginning.