Social Media and Interpersonal Dissonance 

Social Media 

Kyran Million 

Antioch University Santa Barbara 

Like many other young couples in today’s society, my wife and I discovered each other through social media through a friend. While our lives mostly lived in the real world, our social media and technology use is very constant and a good part of our lives together. Throughout our three and half years of courtship and marriage, one thing that I’ve noticed and become concern with is how, when we are together, we are often on our phones, computers or tablets. At dinner, at home, in the car, and with family, we can often be glued to our phones or devices which is a very isolating and a discouraging way to interact. Often, if I’m with friends or my wife and I need their attention to answer a question of mine, I am met with a annoyed response as if I’ve interrupted them from something important or intense, but it’s usually nothing of importance just something they were interested in. People in today’s society use texting or emailing someone to get something to or for them when they could have just as easily asked for it. This over-consumption of social media and technology create a dissonance from real world discomforts and peoples’ complex relationships that hinders communication and interpersonal relationship skills needed to foster beneficial and prosperous relationships. 

Social Media’s essential element of seduction is its platform to provide a place of total idealism and control. Everyone is being conditioned to having everything at all times and that creates a imbalance of face to face relationships and digital ones. Sherry Turtle in her Ted Talk calls it, “ the goldilocks effect: not to far, not to close, just right” (Turkle 2013). She’s commenting on her interviews with people who are preferring experiencing each other in doses they can control by escaping through technology and social media. They find it easier for themselves to only engage when is convenient or beneficial to them, and while Turkle believes this condition of picking and choosing to be detrimental to our social skills and health, she empathizes to these peoples’ situation at minute 7:10 by saying, “human relationships are rich, and they’re messy, and they’re demanding, and we clean them up with technology,” (Turkle 2013). But it never the less is creating a void in the interaction of human beings. I see this in my relationships with my wife and my friends and I feel distant or feel as though I know them less because we don't converse the way we did even when we get together. 

Besides this isolation while being together problem, Social media also gives us people to connect to that we’ve never met, that distracts us from actual relationships because technology and social media can create more exciting situations than in real life.  While Sites like Facebook and Instagram provide this picture-perfect profile for your life and it’s events so that you can share it with your fans, Sites like Second Life allow you to leave everything about our lives behind and invent entirely new personas called Avatars for us to do as we please in a virtual landscape of possibilities. It’s perfect for people that feel as though their lives are not exciting and faster than going though the painstaking process of making something of yourself in real life. Author Arnold Brown believes this will become more and more popular in coming years as the way we connect and build relationships when he says, “relationships made in virtual space can be just as powerful and meaningful as those formed in the real world” (Brown 2011). This is a powerful statement because we will start to see how social media is seducing us into not interacting in the real world at all that will break down the conventions of our society and render us less and less empathetic and connected as human beings. 

The temporal and spatial “here-and-now” limitations that formerly characterized social interactions such as dating and family get-togethers have broken down. The composition of, and behavior in, relationships and households in the future will therefore change seriously.

- Brown, The Futurist 2011

Brown recognizes in his report that the change is inevitable, and will have serious side effects on us as a species. Social media’s cultural acceptance all stems from the underlying desire to be treated as we wish so that the people we value see us in the way we’d prefer all of the time. The unfortunate side of this is that, by developing ourselves online we spend actually less time making those changes in real life and that takes away from those around us and society as a whole. While those online connections and relationships maybe valid, our lives and interactions in our real world lives will fall by the way-side and may become unfulfilling with our digital alternatives.  Living a lie only to be find one’s inner truth, but at the cost of other’s who choose another way of life. 

Technology and social media has stunted our conversations down to very precise snippets of language as only a means to gather the most necessary information. Kids and young adults are finding it increasingly difficult to convey information not in text form. The reason for this is because having actual conversations are unfiltered. With face to face interactions people have to be able to provide articulate and correct answers to questions and reactions to things the other has said in real time and that is nerve racking. Turtle discovers, “it is not surprising to find troubling patterns of connection and disconnection: teenagers who will only “speak” online, who rigorously avoid face-to-face encounters, who are intent contact with their parent fifteen to twenty times a day,” (Turkle, 2011). Turtle’s research and observations is exposing how vulnerable people, especially young adults and teenagers are to social media sites and communities and technology. it’s there when you need it, but it creates a language and interaction which is cold and isolating.  Social media and technology is hindering human-to-human interaction among families and new generations. These kids will not be able to have robust conversations with their boss, build nurturing relationships with their kids and spouses. They will be passive when it comes to confrontation and ambiguity and not be able build upon any experience because of their over use of social media and technology. 

The availability of social media and technology also is a crippling aspect of peoples social interactions. Now that everyone is available at a moment’s notice, anxiety and a hopeless loneliness can be thrust upon anyone who sends a text and does not receive one back. “After Julia sends out a text, she is uncomfortable until she gets one back,” (Turkle 2011). Turkle is interviewing a high school girl who express her desperation and anxiety around feeling validated by her peers. Sending text messages provides that stability, because having a conversation is too terrifying and burdensome, but without that response, she is paralyzed and becomes neurotic. On the opposite side of the spectrum you also have the safety net of these sites to provide a pacifier for those who deal with depression and the loneliness of not having actual human relationships. “Leo, a college sophomore far from home, who feels crippling loneliness. He tells me that he “handles” this problem by texting and calling his mother up to twenty times a day,” (Turkle, 2011). Turtle is bringing forth another quivering side effect of our attachment to social media and technology, its use as an emotional social crutch to disguise what is really going on. 

Social media, while being reliable, available, proliferating, and enjoyable, also carries with it a burden of addictive, crippling, and isolating qualities. In it’s ability to connect people all around the world and deliver mind expanding scenarios and adventures, it’s conventions divide and size up everyone to each other. In so doing this, everyone becomes something other than themselves and diminishes their abilities to express, connect, or be vulnerable with someone in real life because of the un-editable mediums in which they would converse. If people can set the phones down, dedicate their time, patience, and energy to making a real life connection with someone else in their lives, the difference could mean a more healthy balance in their lives, their family and friends lives, and future generations lives. If we take the time to be with each other then we also may possibly find a newer and and deeper appreciation of the social media as an tool for social interaction as apposed to all social interaction. 

References

Brown, A. (2011, March/April). Relationships, Community, and Identity in the New Virtual Society. The Futurist, 29-34.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

T. (2013). Connected, but alone? - Sherry Turkle. Retrieved June 11, 2016, from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv0g8TsnA6c