Social Media's Impact on Relationships

In a world where everything around us is constantly changing, communication is an essential key to interacting with others and developing our society. Over time, the way people communicate with each other has changed tremendously, creating a more innovative way to keep in touch with those around us social media has been around for as long as we can remember, beginning with newspapers and magazines and leading into emails, text messages, and different sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Traditional forms of communication such as phone calls and letters have been replaced by text messages and emails, allowing faster and more efficient responses.

Social media has been reconstructing individuals and their relationships at an unrivaled speed and unlike before, we constantly have access to social media through our cell phones, making it virtually impossible for us to avoid this new sensation.

Social media and the rest of the world will never stop changing, but does that mean we have to change with it has never been easier to get in touch with someone; regardless of if they live down the street or across the world, social media has made it almost effortless to keep in touch with old friends as well as new friends without even having to leave your home.

It also creates an opportunity for those with similar interests to come together and communicate with each other, making the idea of talking to a complete stranger a little less intimidating. Giving users a sense of individuality, social media sites such as Twitter allow people to express themselves through their posts, creating an open platform where someone can state their thoughts and beliefs for others to see and respond to.

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Focusing on the idea of personal beliefs and being your own person, Twitter is essentially what Ralph Waldo Emerson was trying to promote all along, he just didn‘t know it yet.

Emerson’s idea of, “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today” correlates perfectly with the concept of tweeting what you want at the moment and not letting it affect what you may tweet the next day. Having your own set of thoughts and beliefs is what Emerson felt, made you a great person Anyone can be a follower, but it takes someone special to be a leader. There is no right or wrong way to do social media it is simply a place for people to grapple with social norms and develop skills to create new forms of self-expression. As most of the world‘s main source of information, social media has changed the way we look at society and the people around us.

Most news stories are published on Twitter and Facebook before they even hit the evening news, giving people less of a reason to rely on old-fashioned forms of communication, sites such as Instagram are used by all types of people, even celebrities and influential figures such as Barack Obama, making it easier for people to stay up to date with the things that they are most interested in. The impact that social media has on society is far greater than we realize; it not only affects the way people think but it also makes a difference in the way we act with one another. Society‘s ability to create standards and “rules” that try to tell us what is right and wrong, plays a role in the way we perceive those around us and make us think twice about the way we act so that we are not looked down upon by others. Society feeds off of people like Jane Bennet, someone who will risk their individuality because they are scared of what will happen if they go against what everyone wants them to do and then there are those who are more along the lines of Elizabeth Bennet, someone who speaks the truth and doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her.

The difference between these two sisters in Pride and Pre’udice (by Jane Austen) serve as a perfect example of how social media can either make or break the impact that society has a on a person. Tired of seeing her sister get eaten up by society, Elizabeth argues, “Oh! You are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes, I never hear you speak ill of a human being in your life”. Having followed the rules ever since she was a child, Jane Bennet had molded herself and her beliefs into exactly what society wanted her mother had drilled the idea of marriage and wealth into her head and that became her main focus in life while her sister, Elizabeth, was the complete opposite. She knew what was right for her and no one could stop her being herself, not even the man she wanted to marry.

We can see here that once a person has been influenced by the rules of society, individualism is hard to achieve because they no longer know what it means to think for themselves being a woman in society, there are many expectations that are placed on us from how we should act to how we should dress in order to be considered a lady. Just because someone may wear sweatpants one day does not mean that they are not a lady because they are not constantly in a dress and heels but this a simple concept that has become difficult for people to grasp. Having many male cousins, I have been able to witness first- hand just how much of an impact social media can have on the way a person is perceived Facebook makes it easy to see how a person looks and behaves based on the activity that is posted on the site. It’s as easy as going to someone’s profile and looking through their pictures which can tell you more about their personality than you may ever know. Recently, I encountered a situation where a male cousin of mine made assumptions about someone based on what he had seen through social media.

Having never talked to this person before, he began to say that she must be snobby and rude because her tweets always sounded like she was complaining and her Facebook and Instagram pictures were mostly pictures of herself without other people. It was surprising for me to see that my cousin was judging someone based off their social media activity when in reality, he had no idea what this girl was really like, Facebook might as well be called pride and prejudice. We present ourselves with so much pride and expect others to open about our ideas but in reality, we are constantly being judged Instead of trying to understand one another, we take what we see and use it to form opinions about one another. In a way, you could say that social media allows you to meet new people that you might not have met otherwise but at the same time, it also works against individuals because of how they may portray themselves using social media, leading to false accusations such as in this case.

Social media and technology have taken over the lives of everyone from toddlers to grandparents, leaving no one behind. In a city as busy as New York, it is nearly impossible to walk down the block without seeing someone texting, talking or staring at his or her cellphone, but how many times do we see people actually having a face-to-face conversation? With this new age of social media, what used to be normal, interpersonal conversations have become almost extinct due to the various other ways people can now communicate with each other. Instead of asking someone which subway to take in order to get to Grand Central, one can simply look it up on their cell phone and avoid the conversation completely. Interpersonal conversations help to build confidence and speaking skills that are useful in everyday life as well as professional life but with the decrease in face-to-face conversations, it has become difficult for the new generation to voice their opinions and create new relationships with others.

For example, job interviews used to take place in a professional setting where the employer would formally speak to the applicant and ask them questions regarding their qualifications nowadays, interviews are being held over the phone and through video calls, making it easier for the applicant to hide their nervousness and unprofessionalism. Children as young as three years old are now being introduced to the idea of iPads, making everyone around them virtually invisible and decreasing the number of personal interactions they have at a young age. Over the past weekend, I attended a religious event at the temple that I have been going to ever since I was a little girl. Having basically grown up there, calling it my second home, it was interesting to see how the new generation of kids acted as opposed to how my cousins and I acted when we were growing up there. One thing I noticed was how every one had a cell phone, even kids as young as 12 had their own cellphones, which they would never let go of thinking back to when I was that age, I hadn’t even thought of asking for a cell phone because I was more interesting in playing outside with my friends and watching TV.

Instead of playing outside with all the other kids, everyone was invested in their phones, whether it was checking Instagram or Snapchatting. Because of this, none of the kids really made an effort to get to know each other whereas when I was their age, I met some kids at the temple that have become like family to me. It is interesting to see how social media has not only impacted the way the older generation acts, but it has started to change the way the younger generation acts as well. Learning the alphabet used to be a family activity that parents looked forward to but now, it is as simple as handing a child an iPad and downloading an application that will allow them to teach themselves. Becoming so dependent on social media and technology takes away from learning basic life skills and ultimately affects the overall behavior and beliefs of a person.

With the amount of time people spend on social media sites and listening to the radio television, it is normal for their thoughts to be affected by what they are exposed to. Reading the latest news stories used to mean picking up a newspaper or waiting for the evening news but now it is all available on our cellphones and tablets; making it more accessible than before Having lived a quiet life as a gardener, chance was never exposed to what was going on in the world around him the only knowledge he had of the outside world was what he saw on television. Through a series of fortunate events, Chance, also known an Chauncey Gardiner, becomes a public figure and is looked up to by many for what he has to say-except in reality, all he has to say is what he has learned from watching television “By changing the channel he could change himself.

He could go through phases, as garden plants went through phases, but he could change as rapidly as he wished by twisting the dial backward and forward” (Kosinski, 5), Chance’s perception of the world was based on what he was told to believe from the people on television; he himself did not have his on individualistic ideas about what the world was like. Every channel has something different to talk about and depending on what channel you are watching, you are a different person. One channel could sway you towards believing one thing while another could make you believe something completely different. By just turning the dial forwards or backward, you can get a different outlook on life and alter the way you normally thought of certain situations. This goes to show that people will believe anything they hear and let it influence the decisions they make and how they see things, over time, what we see and hear through social media can make us lose the individuality that we once had and cause us to forget the people we were.

In my religion, a person is not allowed to take a picture of our deity because they feel that it is disrespectful. When offering their prayers inside the temple, I have seen many middle-aged people taking pictures when they were are supposed to and I have overheard them saying that they needed their picture for Instagram. I was personally very shocked and taken aback when I heard this come from an adult’s mouth because it was basically like they were putting a bunch of “likes” over their own religious beliefs. The environment that we are surrounded by makes a difference in the way we think and act, sometimes making it difficult for us to realize what is right and wrong, taking place during the cultural revolution, Lin Kong was faced with many roadblocks when it came to making life-changing decisions.

The restrictions and rules that were set in place by the government made it hard for him to do as he pleased, having to take into consideration the severe consequences he could face, knowing that she could not have a relationship with Lin until he was divorced, Manna wu asked him to divorce his wife, only to hear Lin argue, “I can‘t just dump her like a pair of outworn shoes. I have to give a good reason, or else everybody will condemn me and I won’t be able to get a divorce” (Jin, 78). We sense that Lin is put in a tough place between the woman he wants to be with and doing what is morally right. We see later on that Lin‘s attempt at divorcing his wife causes people to look at him differently and think of him as a bad man. When leaving the court after being denied a divorce, Shuyu’s brother, Ben-Sheng, had arranged for people of the village to stand outside and scorn him. After hearing people yell cruel things such as “Small wonder he has no heart, Doctors are butchers”.

Lin was reluctant to go on with the process of getting a divorce for a fear that it could ruin his reputation. Social media gives people the opportunity to be themselves, to build their page so that it reflects what they believe in as individuals, but it has worked to do the complete opposite. The information that social media provides impacts the lives of everyone that crosses its path, stripping them of their individuality and altering their thoughts to match what everyone else believes. Instead of giving people a place to share their opinions, it is taking away the voice that they already had and causing them to hide behind a computer cellphone screen, away from those around them. Do you think Gandhi‘s words, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” would have been as powerful it he had tweeted them? He used the voice he had to help those around him find their own voices and now, it is time that we found our.