Social Media Ruining Relationships Part 2

Throughout my blogs I have talked about how everything that is on social media is affecting society. As this is my very last blog post, I will be making a continuation of my previous post, which is about social media disrupting relationships.

If we compare love from the 50s and 60s to the “love” nowadays, it is completely different. In the old days, boys were taught to properly talk to a girl, take her on dates, and then ask her to be their girlfriend. In the generations now, all it takes to get a girl is to just hit her up saying she’s cute. The only thing wrong with this is that we fall for it even though it may be a person we’ve never met before. Why? We love the attention and the feeling of being noticed and not being compared to another girl that may be “prettier” than us. Recent studies have linked social support to mental health, showing that it doesn’t take much to just get online and start a “relationship.”

An article titled “Social Media’s Impact on Relationships,” by Shelley Galasso Bonanno states, “Online friendships, while certainly valuable in many ways, lack the ability to provide us with opportunities for deep and lasting emotional closeness.” From online relationships we do not get to experience the same effects and benefits that we would get from a relationship where you get to spend time in person with your significant other.

As my journey to seek answers to all the questions I had about social media comes to end, I would like to say that I have definitely responded to all the questions I once had. I would like to conclude by saying that social media has a big impact on our lives today and will always continue to, but if we work together we can change the way social media is used. Being the generation of tomorrow, we can make the effect of social media add nothing but positivity to our lives. 

Galasso Bonanno, Shelley. "Social Media’s Impact on Relationships." Psych Central. 6 Oct. 2015. Web. 21 May 2016.

Social Media Ruining Relationships Part 1

Proceeding on my research, many questions and answers have been discovered. One topic that has a strong tie to social media is relationships. I have saved this topic especially for my last two blogs because relationships are something that have significantly transmuted overtime due to the affect of social media. Many people are able to see and relate to this change. 

While doing research on the ever popular question, "what has social media changed in our lives?" I came upon many answers. However, one article that caught my eye is the post titled, "How Social Media is Ruining Relationships," this article mentions five facts which will be discussed throughout this blog as well as my next. 

The first major thing in the article is people lacking social skills. The post mentions, "people are more confident in having conversations when they're able to 'just slide into people's DMs or type out a quick Facebook message'." This generation feels it is less difficult to just text someone rather than doing it the old fashioned way and approaching them for a conversation face to face. This is due to the fact that people no longer have to worry about gestures and looks if they're talking to someone over a device. However, when it comes time to actually go out on a date, we forget how to interact. We sit there awkwardly knowing not what to talk about or how to act. We start wanting to be able to go back online to share our experiences. 

The second way social media is ruining relationship is that our expectations are becoming unrealistic. Many posts online are about "boyfriend goals" or "body goals." We then start thinking and we want the same things as other people out there in the world are getting. The author of the article continues with, "the easy access to stalking someone has caused a lot of insecurity and arguing among people in relationships." After seeing posts on social media about girls receiving flowers or chocolate when they're on their periods of just cute little notes from their boyfriends, we start to want things like that too. People tend to forget that no relationship is perfect. What goes on social media is only a small portion of what actually goes on in the lives of most people. The videos and pictures of sweet gestures make us believe that there is a such thing as a perfect relationship when there really isn't. We need to start appreciating and being thankful for what and whom we already have in our lives instead of wishing for more. 

There are still more reasons as to why interaction over the web is destroying relationships which will be continued on my next blog post. However, before I conclude this post, I want to mention why this article really stood out to me. Overall, it makes a great point on how relationships are changing and most people don't even notice it. Their wants become larger than their needs. People start wishing for things that they don't receive and if they don't get the things they want they become unhappy. This melancholy behavior towards their partner is the cause of the downfall of most relationships.

Jasmine. "How Social Media Is Ruining Relationships." Odyssey. 17 Sept. 2015. Web. 17 May 2016.

Social Media Affecting Friendships

        Did you know that the average person spends 4 years of their lifetime looking down at a phone? It's kind of ironic isn’t it? Continuing on my ongoing research, I am going to now talk about how countless friendships have been ruined as a result of social media. As we all know, a large number of friendships commence on the Internet. However, with that, there's a limit to how many friends we can actually have. Mentally, we can't keep track of more than 250 real-life people, but most of us have many more online friends. That means a 20 year old with a thousand online friends is more likely collecting friends for status purposes – no real friendship. Also, trying to keep track of hundreds of online friends online dilutes our energy and attention away from the people we really care about. 

         Cherie Burbach wrote in her article, How Social Media Gets in the way of Friendships, "social media is what has changed the way we keep in touch and communicate." This statement is true since even when we are out hanging with out friends, we are posting on social media telling our “social media friends” what we are up to. 

        The media is used as a tool to let out emotions about people whom may never know how you're thinking about a situation. Numerous amounts of people like to let their feelings out by venting and letting their stress out on Twitter by sending tweets. Most times we think we are the cause of this so then we start venting and staring all this drama that could lead to the termination a friendship from just one tweet that most likely wasn’t about you. 

Burbach, Cherie. "6 Ways Social Media Is Ruining Your Friendship." About.com Dating & Relationships. Web. 14 May 2016.

Social Media Affects Emotion

Continuing on with me research, we can all come to agreement that social media is addictive. We tend to check or social media 150 times a day and half of that time we are updating our status. Being on our phones can bring us a lot of emotions whether we realize it or not. Many of us can say that social media makes us happy. After a long day of school, work, practice we like to come home and check our snapchat, Instagram, twitter and just see what people are doing with their lives. We like to see all the twitter drama that is going on and we laugh at it, and this is something we like to do because it makes us happy.
It does not only make us happy but also sad many times. A survey was done in the UK and it was said that 50% of the people that use social media are sad just scrolling through. This may be because a girl posted a bikini picture that made our self-esteem go down or because someone went to the concert and had front row tickets to the concert you wanted to go to, or maybe the guy you like posted/commented a pic of a girl.  In this respect, social network can act as an uncomfortable mirror against which we unconsciously measures ourselves and determine our own sense of worth. They are also a reminder of the benefits of true social interaction, also known as meeting up with someone and taking to them.
According to a article written by Tanya Lewis titled, Emotions Can Be Contagious on Online Social Networks, a study took place of 689,003 people and at the end of the study "they found that people who had positive words removed from New Feeds made fewer positive post and more negative ones, whereas people who had negative words removes made fewer negative posts and more positive ones." So basically people who saw fewer emotional post in their news feed were less expressive overall.
We can come to a conclusion that social media puts us through emotions that we do not need to be put through. We let what other people do or say choose wether or not we should be happy or sad. That is not how life should work, and we need to realize that.

"10 Ways Social Media Affects Mental Health." Degreed Blog Atom. 2015. Web. 11 May 2016.

Lewis, Tanya, and LiveScience. "Emotions Can Be Contagious on Online Social Networks."                       Scientific American. Web. 11 May 2016

Social Media Causes Self-Esteem Issues

Self-Esteem plays a really big role in the world we live in. We can be the most beautiful person and still feel ugly.  I was telling one of my moms customers about this school blog I am writing and how my next topic was how social media affects people self-esteem and she told me how this a very string topic. She mentioned how one thing that she thinks about a lot is how her parents relationship was/is built so strongly yet she cant even get on second base. Then she bought up this really good point how back in the olden days, they didn’t have 800-900 people judging them on their significant others looks or liking pictures in their disposal when their marriage or relationship didn’t work out. She said that back then a guy didn’t care how skinny or fat you were; how much acne you have; how much makeup you were; stretch marks or not; Goth or not. NONE of that mattered and nowadays that’s all that seems to matter!

Teresa Newsome in her article, 7 ways social media can affect your self-esteem, brings up really good points on how today’s struggles are “tenfold, as not only do you have to look good and be interesting, but you have to be good at things and appear successful and you have to also seem to have an interesting life.”

I am only going to talk about 2 of the 7 topics she has mentioned and touch up on how those 3 things affect our self-esteem. The first one is “The Ads.”  We may not notice it but we compare our self to Ads all the time. For example if we see the Kendall Jenner or Gigi Hadid is on a cover of Vogue magazine for a swim shoot then we will think, “why can’t I look like that?” Also a really good impact on EVERY girl’s life is Victoria Secret.  Whatever social media you open up, you will find VS somewhere whether it be there pink line, bathing suit line, or the fashion show. And we all know how there expectations for their models are super high so that bring us down in so many levels. One last example Newsome uses is “The Folly of the Tutorial.” This means that social media is filled with how to do things like makeup, shop, brands. Brands and individuals post tutorials on everything from how to get the perfect eyebrows to what high company brands we should wear.

Basically the social media builds up who we are and if we don’t do what to media tells us then we have low self-esteem because everyone is so quick to judge.

"7 Ways Social Media Can Affect You Self-Esteem." Bustle. Teresa Newsome, 26 Jan. 2015, Web. 07 May 2016.