Is Making Real Friends on the Internet Good

The topic of whether technology is having a positive or negative effect on society is still highly debatable and complex. Opinions on this topic are likely to be related to the relationship and contact between people. In is making real friends on the internet good essay outcomes of using technology are analysed.

Over the past decades, there is a significant development in technologies and this result in changing the ways of how people communicate and interact with one another. This essay holds that technology is doing more harm than good to human connection because it reduces the chance of face-to-face communication among people. This essay will first discuss two detrimental effects of technology, followed by arguing the potential benefits that technology brings to humanity.

Firstly, the communication skills of people become worse. In this digital world, people reach for their phones as soon as they wake up to reply to text messages. The rest of the day, they are frequently using laptops and mobile phones for sending business emails, twittering and browsing. They are more used to messaging than face-to-face communication, and there are studies showing that people with this behavior are losing contact with the society and further point out that they generally have poor social skills. They do not know how to express their feelings as they usually use emoji in online communication and can hardly identify the tone of others resulting in not able to notice whether the person talking to is saying something serious or joking. Some may argue that with the aid of technology, a channel is provided for people to easily communicate with one another, one’s communication skills will not be undermined as replying messages are just the same as a direct conversation. However, in the internet world, people are allowed to ignore one’s message. Markus suggested that people reply to emails on a selective basis, they intentionally avoid unwanted social interaction. The evidence suggests that people may just ignore the message when they do not know how to reply and if this behavior continues, this will result in poor communication and socializing skills. 

Secondly, technology result in the alienated relationship between family and friends. Nowadays, people are heavily relying on technology to remind them of important things or dates. For example, some may save down the date of family members or friends’ birthday on their phone, so that they will be reminded by notification and send a short text message to give blessings. This kind of online communication replaces the time people spend with friends and families, people think that sending blessings messages is already enough, no need to spare time to meet up with them. The youngsters may not notify the importance of face-to-face contact, especially with the elderly. They just use technology to communicate with the elderly without actual care, this may make the older people feel lonely. There are statistics showing that “older people feeling more isolated as face-to-face communication is replaced by remote monitoring system”. This show that frequent using of technology may make people think they are socially isolated and not care by others. It seems that technology allows people to communicate in any location without any limitations, this can instead strengthen the relationship between one another. The truth is, people tend to use online communication even the person is next to them is a recent phenomenon in today’s world. A research was done by Emily Drago state that some people feel bothered when families and friends are using technology while spending time together with them. This implies that people are engaged in technology without differentiating whether it is a suitable situation or not and this may further worsen the relationship among people. Regarding the above examples, it can reveal the problem of alienation of relations brings by the use of technology. 

Some may say that technology allows online communication with friends and improve their subjective well-being. As the nature of internet has changed, more people are using the internet and as a result, internet is less isolated. People can make more friends and thus having a positive effect on life satisfaction. Instead of happiness, frequent usage of technology will bring more anxiety and depression to people. Muusses point out that some individual who feel lonely mostly develop a harmful internet use behavior. They are fear being miss out and thus develop a habit of frequently using technology and thus they try to make different friends on the internet without knowing them, especially teenagers who are trying to find a sense of affiliations. They may neglect the truth that some of the friendship make on the internet is not long-lasting and eventually may fall into cyber fraud. Furthermore, this habit may even cause conflict between youngsters and parents. Research shows that college students using SNS to communicate with parents reports a higher level of conflicts with parents. As less face-to-face communication may lead to misunderstanding between parents and children, resulting in a large divergence and cause depression. Therefore, instead of improving well-being, it may be the other way round. 

Deciding whether technology is doing harm or good to humans is highly controversial. In response, this essay has discussed the disadvantages of technology, for example, poor communication skills and alienated relationships and argues against the opposite side, who are saying that online communication improves well-being. Given the above arguments, to a large extent that technology is harming human relationships and communications. These arguments can be used in writing can you make real friends on the internet essay.

Reference

• Elsobeihi, Mohammed & Abu-Naser, Samy. (2017). Effects of Mobile Technology on Human Relationships, 1(5), 110-125.
• Ganong, L.H.; Coleman, M.; Feistman, R.; Jamison, T.; Markham, M.S. (2012). Family Relations, 61(3), 307-409.
• Gentizer, A.L.; Oberhauser, A.M.; Westerman, D.; Nadorff, D. (2011). Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking, 14(1), 71-74.
• Goodman-Dean, J.; Mieczakowski, A.; Johnson, T.; Goldhaber, H.; Clarkson, J. (2016). Computers in Human Behavior, 57(2), 219-229.
• Independent Age. (2018). Older people, technology and community. London, United Kingdom: the Royal United Kingdom Beneficent Association.
• Markus, M. L. (1994). Finding a happy medium: Explaining the negative effects of electronic communication on social life at work. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 12(2), 119-149.