There are myriad phenomena that are worth looking into when it comes to examining the effect of social media on personal relationships. One of those theories has already been mentioned in other areas on this website. That is the media multiplexity theory which says that connecting across multiple platforms results in friendships that will be stronger than those who only use one medium to connect. Other theories include weak ties theory which is credited to Mark Granovetter, a former Stanford university professor. Weak ties theory says that acquaintances are actually a lot more important than one would think. In essence, our acquaintances help us to stay more connected with the outside world because the things that we talk about tend to be more broad as opposed to the specific discussions that we might have with close friends. This is related to social media because technology is one of the avenues through which we can maintain these weak ties that would have otherwise gone away with time. How easy is it to chat about the weather, a breaking news story, or some new development in another country over social media? While those types of topics might seem a bit awkward during in person conversations, it makes more sense to discuss these things with our online friends in order to maintain a connection.

Another theory about friendships that can be applied to social media is Stanley Milgram’s idea of the “Small World Theory”, also known as the “six-degrees theory”. The basic idea behind this theory is that people are much more interconnected than we realize and it’s actually relatively common to meet a stranger adn find out that you know someone that they know also. Social media supports this theory by “suggesting” new people for us to follow based on the people that we already know. While most social media apps frame this as an innocent “suggestion”, it is really based on the fact that they are trying to encourage us to follow people that are followed by people we already like. In addition to that, many social media platforms are now using our contacts to figure out who else has an account on that platform and encourage us to follow them. Milgram’s ideas about how interconnected the human population really is are only further supported by social media’s attempts to engineer new connections based on people that we already know.

Another theory that is relevant to this is the idea of the propinquity effect, which is that the more we interact with people, the more we find things that we like about them. This immediately made sense to me because the more time we spend with someone, the more we can get to know them and find out more that we have in common. This can be related to Jeffrey Hall’s theory about the amount of hours it takes to become friends with someone, as mentioned in another area on this website. This is related to social media because we can easily spend hours on social media each day, looking at pages and customized feeds. Although you aren’t actually spending time with someone when you’re on their social media page, you are still able to find out more information about them, thus increasing the chances that you will start to have positive feelings towards them. In a world where we are increasingly being influenced by our technology, it is important to note the effect that social media often has on the development of our personal relationships. When we are increasingly connected and making split second decisions about whether or not to become friends with someone, we need to know of these mental tactics that can potentially be used to manipulate us and guide us in a direction that we normally would not have chosen.

Note: All of this information has been collected from changingminds.org