Aaron Patton

Mr. Kole Matheson

English 110C

23 February 2016

Nowadays in the world of social medias such as Facebook, Twitter, and Cell phones, there are many more ways for us to communicate with people all throughout the world. Thanks to these creations in this modern age, citizens living in Massachusetts can communicate with other people living in Australia. The wide spread connections that we are provided today allow us to develop relationships with others all throughout the planet. However, depression, lonesomeness, and anxiety are even more common in today’s society before social media really inserted its dominance into everyday lives. Why are people getting more lonely, not less, despite social media and communications technologies? This leads me to wonder whether the “digital life” brings us closer or leads to social isolation?

Having social media is a much easier way to freely communicate with any person you wish in the entire world. Anyone can message someone else on facebook and slowly begin to develop a relationship with one another. Social media can be used almost like an escape for people that do not always communicate well with others in person or face to face. Some people are too nervous to conjure up the confidence to go speak to that gorgeous girl in psych class. Therefore, why not just friend her on Facebook and message her a simple “Hello”? It seems like a much easier, less stressful, and just as productive way to “sweet talk the ladies”. In all honesty, at times it sounds like the quicker and more efficient way to begin conversations with complete strangers. Although, there are many problems with this use of an artificial relationship builder.

When using a social media app to create a relationship with another human being there are many emotions or trust boundaries that are not truly developed, that would easily become a part of the relationship if it were established through real life or face to face communication. For example, when I am in an altercation with someone, both parties react in a much different manner than they would depending on whether it is an online altercation or a face to face situation. Humans naturally feel attachment, due to psychological reasons, to other people after long periods of time of communicating with one another. One of the main reasons humans experience even more cases of depression or feeling lonely even with all these social resources at our disposal, is because it is not a real human to human relationship. These relationships are built and develop through the use of a phone, laptop, or game system. A human can not truly fall in love with someone if they have never actually sat down and had a real life conversation with one another, face to face. Social media may portray real emotions through the computer screen, but no one truly knows how the other person feels if they can not be right by their side and help them through the tough times. Twitter allows humans to sympathize with one another over tweeting and retweeting, but true love can not be generated by just talking; relationships are created by experiencing real life together.

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. By using the process of triangulation, I narrowed down the three things i needed to have answered in the topic proposal and my argument for the documented essay, which are lack of physical and emotional development, which lead to psychological “mishaps”; still feel lonesome or suffer from depression.

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.

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

“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.

Technology in today’s society is used every single second, minute, and hour of each and every day. Multiple times a day, billions of humans access the internet and are communicating  throughout the entire world. That being said, with so many opportunities for connection and communication with random human beings all across the planet, then why has social anxiety and depression become much more prevalent in today’s day and age. The social media revolution has caused humans to sign on to Facebook or Twitter to express their problems, concerns, and struggles within their lives; rather than going to a friend or family member that truly cares about my well-being and my true emotions.

One of the main reasons I believe these emotional alterations are occurring is the abundance of accessibility of the technological resources. No to mention, that is it quicker to go post a tweet rather than wait for a friend or sibling to sit down, listen, and talk to you in order to help. This reasoning lead me to hypothesis on why these emotional disorders are more relevant in today’s society more than ever. Which is that social isolation occurs due to that humans over time have forgotten how to effectively communicate between one another due to the availability of technology.

Many humans in today’s technological age have had an experience of a relationship or began a relationship by the means of online internet access. A great example would be myself, I have had a relationship that began through the usage of Instagram and Text messaging; even though we went to the same school. We followed each on instagram and began to like each other’s photos, next thing we knew we were leaving comments at the bottom. We exchanged our numbers through Instagram’s Direct Messaging tool. For about two months we were constantly texting, and finally met at the YMCA pool in our county. Instantly I knew I was attracted to her, so we sat down by the pool and began to talk about how our days’ were going. I found myself infatuated with her thoughts, her voice, her day, just her in general. If i believe a saying, it is the saying of “I fell in love at first sight”.

A month passed by, we were still just talking, and were not ready to commit to a relationship. The main reason why, you ask? She and I could only look at each other, there was never any dialogue spoken, we absolutely could not connect emotionally. We had complete physical attraction, but that was not enough for me; when you are in a relationship I want to have someone that I can go to them and tell them any single thing that has happened to me good or bad and be comfortable enough to explain it and trust them to keep it to themselves. However, we had none of that, nothing, nada, zilch; we just had that spark and we rode it for as long as it would take us. This then led me down a very dark path, because we never talked about much, she would go around to other guys and “visit” them while we were together. The sickest part of it all was I actually believed her and always trusted her even though I knew I couldn’t. That is what caused me to become a tad bit socially awkward at times, but I still work on it as often as possible!

I believe I was sucked into this type of relationship due to the fact that I didn’t meet her in person, and I had met her over the phone. There was never any true symbiotic emotional development between each other, we sort of just saw each other, and we’re just so attracted to each other we did not care about anything else. That is a very pessimistic outlook of how that situation occurred, but in a nutshell that is almost spot-on. Through the usage of logos, pathos, and ethos I explained my side of the argument of whether social media in today’s day and age certainly has some impact on the prevalence of social anxiety and depression in our society today. I gave credible sources, I provided my own personal experiences, and I guided you through my side and the opposing side of the argument.