Why I Think Social Media May Be Ruining All Of Our Friendships

Think about it. We're constantly connected, constantly turned on. If you're like me, part of your daily morning routine includes checking the usual social media websites: facebook, twitter, instagram, vine, snapchat, etc. We are constantly using social media to shove our nose into other people's buisness. And we let it be done right back to us, by uploading pictures and checking in somewhere anytime we leave the house, or tweeting witty quotes and dramatic lyrics. With social media, we can instantly tell what many of our close friends are doing, whom they're doing it with, and how they feel about it.

That's great…isn't it? It's great that we can see photos from vacations, or hear about how much fun you had at that concert last night. We can be up to speed on everything, like we never missed a beat. We can share our experiences with our friends and in return our friends share them. But do we really need to share everything?

Here is my attempt to rationalize this abstract concept of plastering our personal lives all over for the world to see. It might not seem abstract, but think about it for a few minutes and you’ll probably get really lost in your mind about what it all means and what it says about our generation and how soon no one will know how to have a face to face interaction. At least, that’s what happened to me. So maybe I’m just crazy and this isn’t such an abstract concept to anyone else.

Regardless, I tried to sum up how social media is ruining our friendships by giving you three main reasons. And here they are:

1) We Don't Catch Up Anymore

Simply because there is nothing to catch up on. If we constantly know what everyone around us is doing, what are we supposed to talk about when we get together? I find myself guilty of this too often. I am out to lunch or just hanging out with a friend and they start to tell a story of something they've done since we last saw one another and I interject "oh yeah I saw the picture! I didn't know Joe was going with you to that. Your new shirt looked great, by the way." How can we catch up one each others lives if there's nothing really to catch up on?

2) Hanging Out Turns Into Sitting In A Room With Someone Staring At Your Respective Phones

As previously mentioned, I am just as guilty of doing this as anyone else, it is just something that's really been nagging at me recently. I cannot get it out of my head. So much time spent with friends is becoming sitting in silence while we are on our respective technological device, tweeting about being with each other, or editing a picture of being together, but we're not really spending quality time together in doing this. Because we haven't missed anything, have we? (This takes me right back to reason #1). Not if we've been checking social media, or even just texting and iMessaging daily. That's the problem I think. That's as far as I can pin point it. Social media is damaging our friendships because it is allowing us to be with them in some form of the word almost 24/7. If we can be with them so much, how can we miss them? Absence makes the heart grow fonder, doesn't it? No absence means I know everything there is to know about what you've been up to and so while we're at lunch I'm going to check my news feed and see what other people are doing. 

3) Sometimes, we just need to be unreachable.

Not so long ago, people used to go out without cell phones or computers. They'd go out all of the time without them. And they'd survive. They'd do what they needed to do and come home. They would go days without talking to some of their best friends. Because they weren't always reachable. They weren't always connected, always turned on. I have this giant pit in my stomach and it's the unwavering fear that we are missing out on our lives because we're too busy posting about it on the internet. We don't know how to talk face to face anymore, or we don't do it nearly as often as we should. 

Going off of this, I think reasons 1-3 happen because we don't have an attention span anymore, at least not really. Holding eye contact with someone for a five minute conversation at the bank seems invasive and uncomfortable. We can't pay attention to anyone for longer than a few minutes, and that's because we're used to the constantly updating constantly changing world of the internet. We'd rather sit on our phones like have a face-to-face conversation with someone for a few hours makes us fidget and feel trapped.

Here's my suggestion: the next time you're with a friend…maybe you should accidently leave your phone at home. Or in the car. And see what happens.

…But then again, what do I know? Because part of me thinks I’m adding to the problem by posting this.