Don’t Let Social Networking Media Kill Human Relationships

張貼日期：Jun 21, 2013 3:49:1 AM

Crystal Cao

With the rapid development of technology, more and more people rely on the social networking media. They communicate with other people through various media, like Facebook, Line, and Weibo. Many people believe that these online communication tools bring lots of benefits to people’s relationships. Despite many obvious advantages of these social networking websites, they are not without their problems. In my point of view, we should not rely too much on social networking media because they may do harm to human relationships. People may lose their ability to communicate with other people face-to-face, be indulged in the unreal and superficial relationships, and lack a sense of commitment.

For the majority of people, connecting through the social networking media has become the focus of their lives and the source of happiness, which make them forget how to communicate by oral expression. They are good talkers when they are on line, but they may become nervous and clumsy when they talk with people face-to-face. A recent survey of youths between the ages of 19 and 26 in Singapore, China and the U.S. shows that more than half of them are too demanding to keep up with their activities on Facebook, Twitter and the like. No matter in their family or at school, they are busy in updating the information on the homepage of their Facebook. These people are used to talking with people through the Internet, while they don’t know how to communicate with others in reality.

In addition, many people may be addicted to the unreal and superficial relationships on the Internet. Some people can have thousands of friends online even though many of them are strangers to them. Consequently, they may gain a false sense of achievement because they think they have many friends, and then they don’t spend time in caring their true friends in real life. Those people who know each other through social networking media seem like good friends, but without deep interpersonal communication, it's just a fragile and inauthentic relationship. Besides, it may be hard to tell whether someone is a friend or a foe. Some people even date through social networking media, but most of them do not have a happy ending because they know little about these friends. People can’t know each other in a deep way. They may be superficial in their relationships, and put less focus on the real ones.

The last thing is that people may turn the valuable emotion into a cheap one, which reduces their responsibility. Some people may argue that social media mean a convenient and efficient way to communicate with others. This argument may be true to some extent, but is convenience always the best thing? Personally, social networking media provide people a fast food in our relationship since they make friends through them extensively. Thus, human relationships become messy and intertwining, albeit rich and colorful. On the other hand, people learn to delete the relationship through social networking media nowadays. If people do not like this person any more, they delete every message between them. Lacking commitment, people become "easy come, easy go." Easily broken, all the relationships are just like foam.

In conclusion, social networking media may discourage people to live in the moment in reality, and bypass the beautiful relationships in their life. They tend to be ostensible when communicating with others through social networking media. Behind the mask of social networking media, there is just an illusory and fragile human relationship. People must take some actions now to avoid human relationships being killed by social networking media. To sum up, developing meaningful real-life relationships is more important than making the fleeting connections on the social networking media.