Research Paper On The Effect Of Social Media On Friendships (Research Paper Sample)

The Effect of Social Media on Friendships
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Abstract
The use of the social media is rising. People are making friends through the social media, though only 20% of the people who become friends on social media meet in person. Social media platforms like twitter, Instagram, and Facebook allow people to send friend requests to those they wish to socialize with. Studies have found out that people who use social media more are more likely to feel socially isolated. Having social media friends in place of real-world or physical friends may be damaging to your well-being because contacts with a person sustain true friendship and that online connections rarely make true friendships. In addition, it is difficult to maintain high quality relationships on social media since the low rates of physical interactions make it hard for people to invest their time in meaningful emotional kind of friendship which makes them choose artificial ones. This is why people should create more time to see their friends physically and not just online.
Introduction
One of the main characteristics of the society today is the rapid development of information technology. The internet has become an indispensable part of our daily life, allowing us to meet and socialize with new people, and even make friends on social media. However, it is to be mentioned that the internet not only makes it possible for us to make many new friends, but also threatens the relationships between people in the real life. The purpose of this paper is to show how social media has affected the way people socialize with each other in real life.
Overview of Literature
A section of people in the world who have access to internet are increasingly using social media for networking. In a report by Pew Research Center, “Social Media Usage: 2005-2015”, it was found that 65% of the United States citizen adults are using social media as of 2015 for networking purposes. This is an increase from 7% in 2005 CITATION And15 \l 1033 (Perrin, 2015).
In another report by Pew Research Center titled, “Teens, Technology & Friendship”, 57% of teens aged between 13 and 17 years in the United States have made friends through social media CITATION Len15 \l 1033 (Lenhart, Smith, Anderson, Duggan, & Perrin, 2015). Surprisingly, it is only a small percentage like 20% of those friends who have met on social media have met in person (Lenhart, et al., 2015). Social media, as the word suggests, is supposed to be a platform where people socialize. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram allow their users to send friend requests and follow people who they wish to socialize with. Sometimes, these requests come from people you don’t know at all (Bapna, & Umyarov, 2015).
Primack, et al. (2017) discovered that those people who reported to have been using social media platforms for at least two hours per day were twice likely to experience a feeling of social isolation as compared to those people who spend less than 30 minutes a day on social platforms. The article, “Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation among Young Adults in the U.S.”, also revealed that those people who would visit the social sites most frequently in a week were thrice likely to experience social isolation compared to those who reported less than nine visits in a week CITATION Pri17 \l 1033 (Primack, et al., 2017). This implies that the more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to feel isolated. This research suggests that having social media friends in place of real-world or physical friends may be damaging to your well-being.
A study by Dunbar (2015) noted that having a large number of friends on social media does not really mean much and if on average a user had an average of 155 friends, they would only trust just four of them. Dunbar’s article, “Do Online Social Media Cut through the Constraints that Limit the Size of Offline Social Networks?”, further found out that there exists a limit on the number of real and true friends we have notwithstanding the numbers we have on social media. Authors of this article have suggested that actual contacts with a person sustain true friendship and that online connections rarely make true friendships.
In another article, “Is the Use of Social Media for Seeking Connectedness or for Avoiding Social Isolation? Mechanisms Underlying Media Use and Subjective Well-Being”, the authors found out that social media had a limited ability to connect individuals compared to physical interactions which connected people in a way that eliminated social isolation CITATION Ahn13 \l 1033 (Ahn & Shin, 2013). It is expected that the more time you spend on social media, the more friends you have hence more connectedness. Contrary to these expectations, a study carried out by Lee, et al. (2015), discovered that both loneliness and depression are associated with the increased use of Facebook. Lee, et al. (2015) wrote their findings in their article, “Passive Facebook Usage Undermines Affective Well-Being: Experimental and Longitudinal Evidence”.
Young people have a lot of social media friends while older people have just a few but more physical friends. This is according to Kaplan & Haenlein’s article named “Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media” Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) noted that there is increased difficulty in maintaining high quality friendships on social media. The low rates of physical interactions make it hard for people to invest their time in meaningful emotional kind of friendship which makes them choose artificial ones (Wang, Jackson, Gaskin, & Wang, 2014).
Utz, (2010) recommends that people should create more time to see their friends physically and not just online. Many of your Facebook friends will probably not care about you or even what you may be going through (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008). All the socializing tools were created so that we can stay connected but they are making us worse friends.
Hypothesis
People who use the social media more are more likely that the other people to feel socially isolated.
Methods
The method used in this research is the qualitative research method. The participants in the survey were college students aged nineteen years and above.
Procedure
The survey involved questionnaires where the students were the respondents. The survey was divided into two parts. The first part talked about friendships while the second part talks about the social media. For the first part, the questions were developed by use of the McGill Friendship Questionnaire while the questions for the second part were developed by use of the Friendship Functions Research.
Discussion
Research has shown that, although the social media helps us to make many new friends online, it negatively affects the number of physical friendships that people make. Most of the people with access to the internet today use the social media to network. These people make a lot of friends on the social media. However, only about 20% of the people who become friends on social media actually meet in person. Research evidence shows that people who spend most of their time in social media do not have many friends in r...