Social Media Hinder Or Enhance Interpersonal Relationships

Does Social Media Hinder or Enhances Interpersonal Relationships?
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Does Social Media Hinder or Enhances Interpersonal Relationships?
Over the last decade, social media has become omnipresent within the entire society. For its obvious reason of keeping people connected, it has been perceived that this widespread of social media will enhance communication among people and boost interpersonal relationships. However, the truth is much far from that, and in fact, the widespread use of social media hinders and acts as a deterrent to good interpersonal relationships. Intensified use of social media alienates individuals from one another, dilutes communications intended to build interpersonal relationships and `contributes to building up of depression that deters good relationship with people around.
Background
In order to make a quality argument that illustrates how social media hinders interpersonal relationships, it is imperative to establish a relationship between social media and interpersonal relationship (Leonardi, Huysman and Steinfield 2013). This can be achieved by defining each of this phenomenon. To begin with, social media is an Internet-based application or messenger that creates a platform over which people can engage in communications, interact, and share experiences, videos and any other media between and among one another across space and time. These platforms include Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and many others. On the other hand, interpersonal relationships refer to a close association between or among people generated through interactions (Leonardi, Huysman and Steinfield 2013). Therefore, social media relates to interpersonal relationships in that it creates a platform for interactions. Ironically, social media has destroyed the association among people as is demonstrated below.
Extensive use of social media in every setting alienates friends from one another in their interaction sites. Best, Manktelow and Taylor (2014), provides a good example to illustrate this scenario. When a bunch of peer groups meets in a social set up, they will take a few minutes to physically interact, and after a few minutes one will flash out a phone followed by another until everyone is holding a phone in hand (Best, Manktelow and Taylor 2014). What follows is that each one will connect to the social media to see what their friends have posted or what is trending. Soon they will start tweeting, follow the conversations and will be deeply engaged in the social media. They do this at the cost of talking and engaging in one another. In other words, they should be interacting on a face-to-face basis which is the most powerful way of building interpersonal relationships (Best, Manktelow and Taylor 2014). Thus social media alienates people from their actual and immediate situations and draws them into virtual world thus hindering them from engaging in a real-time interaction that would have built stronger interpersonal relationships.
Moreover, social media reduces the quantity and quality of communicates which translates to poor interpersonal relationships among people. When there are a lot of messages from different directions, and one is required to reply to all of them, there is ...