Facebook and Interpersonal Relationships

As I sat down at my desk today and logged onto the internet. I took time to notice what exactly it was that I was looking at on the internet. The majority of my time on the internet seemed to be taken up by a term I would like to refer to as “Facebooking.” Almost everyone does this every single day, and although you may not intend to spend a long amount of time on it, somehow you look at the clock and maybe half an hour of time or even more may have already passed. Why is Facebook so addicting to so many people? Why do we spend so much of our free time on Facebook?

I think that Facebook has both benefits, and some disadvantages in our interpersonal relationships whether we realize it or not. However, it depends on how you look at it. One person may think that a disadvantage is also a benefit, and yes it probably is both; much like how the lists in our reading “Evaluating the Social and Cultural Implications of the Internet “ listed the same categories under both the benefits and the harms of the internet.

One of the biggest benefits of Facebook is being able to communicate with both old and new friends, family members, new people with similar interests, and people you may know that live half way across the globe! Facebook keeps you connected with any type of acquaintance whether you communicate through a message, a wall post, instant messenger, or even a poke. You can even look at the news feed and see what has been going on in other people’s life, and it shows peoples news that you might not even care about. I think the biggest benefit Facebook has provided me with is keeping in touch with my cousin from the Philippines. Without Facebook I do not think we would have any other inexpensive way to communicate and see what is happening in each other’s lives. It is instances like these that Facebook maintains and forms interpersonal relationships. However the benefits are not only limited to those which I have listed but also include some from which Brey included in his article about the social and cultural implications of the internet. These benefits are access to information, information dissemination, communication, develop and maintain social relations, community formation and social organization, leisure and entertainment, identity formation and psychological development, and even cultural understanding.

However, most of these benefits listed also turn out to be a disadvantage to our interpersonal relationships. Any of your friends can access your info, and that isn’t bad. It can become a problem though when someone starts to look to deep into everything you have done every day in almost an obsessive manner. I think it is in this situation where many people can either harm or better their relationships. Facebook allows us to in a sense spy on other people, which harms relationships in that communication between one another is not even necessary anymore. I remember the other day I hadn’t talked to an old friend since she broke up with her boyfriend. I checked on Facebook to see how she was doing rather than just giving her a call and keeping in touch and to my surprise I found out she had a new boyfriend. It was in finding out this information that I engaged a conversation with her. Are some of the features on Facebook causing our personal relationships with others to deteriorate? Although Facebook is a social website for means of communication, is it also somewhat making communication between others unnecessary with the news feed feature?Is Facebook's News Feed feature intruding into our privacy? If it is why do we let this happen online when otherwise we would not?

Like Brey and Winner also said, people will start to devote less time to their physical communities and more into their virtual communities. People are spending more time on Facebook chatting, spying, and doing who knows what rather than physically gathering together and maintaining their relationships in that manner. It is along with this disadvantage that one can lose a sense of reality. Facebook is real yes, and it does show everything that people really do and type. But this is a virtual type world in which there seems to be no communication barrier. One can easily say anything to anyone without worrying what to say or how to say it. On Facebook it is not as big of a deal communicating as it is face to face. How does this destroy our communication skills in our real physical communities? Are people able to talk as easily in person as they can on Facebook? Maybe some people can communicate just as easily, but I know I have a very hard time doing so. Is Facebook replacing how we interact with people and getting rid of that initial awkwardness and prodding it takes to get know people? Is it establishing a world in which our social lives are moving from a physical environment to a virtual one?