Social Media Impacting Personal Relationship within Family Unit

Author: Smt. Soma Bhowmick, PhD

In Gupta, Manmohan (Ed).
Impact of Social Media on Youth,
Pune: ISBN: 978-81-937496-1-6, Eureka Publisher, 2018.

Social Media Impacting Personal Relationship within the Family Unit

“I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction.

The world will have a generation of idiots”
- Albert Einstein

Key Words: Social Media, Social Networking Sites, Family, Personal

Relationships, Communication.

Introduction:

Social Media (SM) plays a significant role in our life and as a matter fact it facilitates to build
real-world relationships. Multiplied communication assists individual to become socially
active. However, social media has brought to the forefront certain negative bearings in personal
relationships and has affected the family structure and its functions in more ways than one.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has swiftly altered over the past
couple of decades with a significant occurrence - Social Media and Social Networking
Sites (SNS) have had a phenomenal rise. Change is no slower anymore; the tempo of
change is hastening. In the process of engagement in SM and through the SNS, the
device called mobile and its associated technology has played a vital role in determining
the effect of social media. The mobile phone enables us to connect anywhere, at any
time and the network follows you wherever you go.

SNSs have become the most utilized or the most favored tool for the ever increasing
communication among friends and relatives however there is a flip side too. SNSs have shrunk
the real-time communication to the bare minimum and this has impinged on the actual life
relationship in an appalling manner. Such addictions to SNSs through SM are dangerous
because virtual life has impacted real time communications and experiences, thereby leading to
many relationship issues within the family unit.

SNSs like Facebook, Twitter etc. enable individuals to come across new people who are
absolutely strangers, find and connect to long lost friends, they generate numerous virtual
communities whose members have similar interests and thereby fashion affiliation, liaison and
rapport. But virtual relationship can be full of falsity, deceit, misleading information and
dangerous too. Relationships generated out of SNSs cannot replace family ties and the bonding
of actual relationship. Virtual relationships replace the socialization process with social
awkwardness, no doubt life and some of its tasks are being made easy with the use of SNSs but
again people lose out on facing real life situations and many life experiences.

In many cases it is found that people who are using social media and spend a major section of
their waking hours are less productive than others and over time increasingly have less
interaction with their family members. This may lead to a situation where people are cut off
from their families and they develop depression, loneliness, mental illness, sleep and eating
disorder etc. In the past couple of decades, several studies have been undertaken on family
communication from a range of theoretical perspectives. The current paper focus on issues that
relate to the usage of SNSs and the extent of the impact on personal relationships within the
family set up.

Understanding Social Media (SM) and Social Networking Sites (SNSs): Social
media operate via computer-mediated tools and technologies that assist the formation and
dissemination of knowledge and information, ideas, career goals and interests and other forms
of manifestation via virtual groups/communities and arrangements. It is a challenge to bring
about definitions; the range of services available on social media is too wide to be delineated.
SM is outlined as forms of electronic communication through which
consumer/customer/client initiate online groups to contribute and share
news/knowledge/information, ideas, pictures, videos, personal messages, live messages
etc. SNSs use websites and applications to share and communicate with others. They operate
through web-based technologies on desktop computers; laptops or download services that
allow running social media to their mobile devices like smart-phones and tablet computers.
They are used to locate and find people, and exchange ideas and communicate similar and or
dissimilar interests. SNSs facilitate users to connect individually, in groups and communities,
facebook is an example.

Highly interactive podiums are created that enables individuals, communities, political, social
and economic organizations to share, to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome, thrash out,
and transform the content that is generated by the users or already prepared content posted
online. In the process it leads to significant and invasive alterations to the interactions that
occur at several levels and in several types of relationships in businesses, organizations,
communities, and individuals. 1 SM adjusts the manner in which individuals and large
organizations connect. These makeovers are the heart of the up-and-coming realms of techno-
self studies. SM vary from the time-honored paper-based media (e.g., printed magazines and
newsprints) or conventional electronic media such as Television broad-casting in several ways,
including quality,2 scope, rate of recurrence, interactivity, usage, propinquity, and durableness.
SM channels function in the form of dialogue transmission arrangement (many sources to many
receivers).3 Some of the most fashionable SM websites are Baidu Tieba, Facebook (and its
associated Facebook Messenger), Gab, Google+, Myspace, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest,
Tumblr, Twitter, Viber, VK, WeChant, Weibo, WhatsApp and Wikia.

Conceptual Framework: It is a challenge to find a difficult to find a definition with

commonalities for the concept of SM. In fact, SM and Web 2.0 are regularly utilized as one
and the same without perceiving their differences. Related literature on SM presents many
complex technical explanations that revolve around the rationale and procedures of SM.
Therefore, attempting to define SM is a cumbersome venture. However, a beginning can be
made by defining Web 2.0 because SM was developed based on Web 2.0 technologies.

According to one of the first understanding, Web 2.0 is a networked platform that gives the
user control in creating, designing, improving, and sharing content and services.4 Collective
intelligence5 is one of Web 2.0's underlying attribute. (Fig: 1)

1 Kietzmann, Jan H., Kristopher Hermkens, Social media? Get serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social
Media, Business Horizons, Volume 54, Issue 3, May–June 2011, Pages 241-251
2 Agichtein, Eugene, Carlos Castillo. Debora Donato; Aristides Gionis; Gilad Mishne, Finding high-quality content in social

media, WISDOM – Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining: 183–193, 2008.
3 Pavlik & MacIntoch, John and Shawn, Converging Media, 4th Edition, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 189, 2015.
4 O'Reilly, Tim (2007): What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Published in:

International Journal of Digital Economics No. 65 (March 2007): pp. 17-37.

5 Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of

many individuals and appears in consensus decision making.

 (Fig: 1) Application of Collective Intelligence in the Millennium Project (MP)6

In this context, Web 2.0 is a democratic manifestation where in it is a person or individual

centered, its focus is the user, it is a tool that is there for the utility of the user primarily to use
and publish relevant content. SM “is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the
ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and
exchange of user generated content”7.

(Fig: 2) In this context, the Basic Characteristics of SM are as follows:8

• Participation: SM encourages contributions and feedback from all interested parties. It

is something like a participatory project where many participate to work towards the
end –content, in this case the content is the product.
• Openness: most types of SM are open to voting, feedback, comments, and information
sharing. There are rarely barriers to accessing and using content, hence abuse and
trolling also becomes a part of the entire exchange of communication.
• Conversation: while SM provides the opportunity for conversation and are seen as two-
way communication tools, traditional media is about broadcast, in which content is
transmitted or distributed to an audience.

6The Millennium Project (MP) is an independent non-profit think tank composed of futurists, scholars, decision-makers, and business
planners, which focuses on the future. It publishes its annual State of the Future report. It examines such issues as clean water,
population demographics, income inequality, energy, food, science & technology, ethics, economics, health, education, organized crime,
decision-making and foresight, gender relations, demographics, and war and peace.
7 Kaplan, Andreas M., Michael Haenlein, Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, published in

Business horizons, Vol. 53, Issue 1, Pg 59-68, Elsevier, 2010.

8 Mayfield, Anthony. 2007. What is Social Media? (Online resource:

http://www.icrossing.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads/eBooks/What_is_Social_Media_iCrossing_ebook.pdf).
 • Community: SM allows communities to quickly form and effectively communicate
about common interests such as socio-economic or political issues etc.
• Connectedness: Most social media thrive on their connectedness, via links and
combining and converging different media types in one place.

Participation

Connectedness Openness

Social
Media

Community Conversation

(Fig: 2): Basic Characteristics of Social Media

SM in the context of public administration is utilized to elevate citizens to the content co-
creator and sender positions. In fact, the application of SM in the public sector is viewed as an
augmentation of the digitization efforts of the States all across the globe as a new wave of e-
governance.

Historical Perspective: Many years ago Chat Rooms and E-Mails had initiated the SN culture.
Communication was revolutionized by Sabeer Bhatia’s Hot Mail, which enabled interactions
reach its destinations real fast and people across the globe could intermingle and exchange
ideas in chat rooms in real time.

1997-The Birth of Social Media: The first SNS was called Six Degrees. It was named after
the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory and lasted from 1997 to 2001.9 That gap was bridged and
the internet travelled into the period of blogging and instant messaging. Next came the "I Seek
You" (ICQ) it used to be a downloadable program that would enable people to know when
friends and contacts were also online on the Internet. ICQ would allow people using it to page
their contacts and friends, get chatting with them, start and participate in Personal Computer
(PC) to Personal Computer (PC) calls, PC-to-phone and phone-to-phone calling cards calls,
then the AOL’s instant messenger service provider came up that was especially prominent in
the SM lineup.

9Six degrees of separation is the idea that all living things and everything else in the world are Six or fewer steps away from each
other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of Six steps.
2000-The Universal Internet: More and more people started to access the internet by the year
2000, and people increasingly became socially online and it came to be understood as a hobby.
However the number of people increased that wanted to make use of chat rooms to befriend,
date and deliberate upon issues and topics.

2003-The First Generation Social Media Wave: In the early 2000’s it was fashionable to utilize
a website MySpace, people used to set up a profile and make friends. In many ways MySpace
was the earliest SM profile website, another SM website that had made an early beginning is
LinkedIn, it continue to work as a platform for professionals and businesses to network and
acquire jobs.

2005-The Age of Facebook and Twitter: The SM giant, facebook was launched in 2004 by
Mark Zuckerberg and his friends and collaborators. It is currently the number one social media
website that boasts over a billion users, people are addicted to facebook. Another service,
named Twitter was launched; it had the unique distinction of allowing users to send
“tweets” of 280 characters or less. Today, Twitter has over 500 million users.

By 2010-The Rest of the Pack arrived: Other SM service providers and SNSs became popular
by 2010. E.g. Flickr, Photobucket and Instagram to mention a few photo sharing sites. In the
late 2000’s Google Buzz, Loopt, Blippy, and Groupon, Tumblr, Foursquare were quite popular
websites. Currently we have Pinterest, Spotify, and many others. Utilizing SNSs via SM as
business strategy gradually became a very crucial. Today most of the business would include
Facebook and Twitter addresses on their commercials.

Social Media Today: The SM playing field has become very diverse today, there are thousands
of them with different purposes. In terms of popularity, of course, some are more popular than
others.

The Potential of Social Media: A future without SM and SNSs is almost unthinkable; it shall
continue, might be that it becomes better and empower people more. It will be interesting to
note the possibilities that SM shall offer in the near future. It is a tool for making the human
powerful; hence it needs to be handled with responsibilities. However, dangers are already
being discerned as its impacts on human life in various aspects, one foremost area of casualty
are personal relationships within the family unit.

Problem Areas: The family is the fundamental unit of social arrangement. Burgess and Lock
describes family as a group of persons united by ties of marriage, blood or adoption
constituting a single household interacting with each other in their respective social role of
husband and wife, mother and father, brother and sister creating a common culture. According
to Malinowski family is the institution within which the cultural traditions of a society are
handed over to a newer generation. The relations shared between parents and children are one
of authority and respect. According to Talcott Parsons families are factories which produce
human personalities.

However, technologies have replaced the privacy, and intimacy among the members of the
family has shriveled. SM and SNSs have appropriated personal relationships within family
units across the world. Technology via SM and SNSs has impacted relationships unexpectedly
and sometimes negatively. On the other-hand, SM and SNSs has also provided the lee way in
the form of a powerful tool for both the parents and the children to communicate to each other
about difficult issues and resolve them.

Conversely, plentiful family tribulations have arisen due to SNSs, principally with myriad of
people of all various ages, cultures and races exhausting several hours networking on sites like
facebook , Twitter , MySpace etc. SNSs have crafted gigantic schism in relationships with
people who are closest to us. Cyber technology and SNSs are having a negative effect on the
family, as it has replaced their personal tête-à-tête that used to happen within most families.

Personal relationships within most families have taken a hit because of SM and SNSs in the
following areas:
• Typical family dialogue or get-together has now been traded with message texting
compulsive habit among the members; this has led to the reduction of conversations
and the usage of abbreviated words that are in want of sentiments.

• Family time is expended in surfing the Internet and virtual interaction with unknown
people in many instances, this disallows any kind of family connect or development of
personal relationships.

• Addiction to SM and SNSs may make people to abandon their crucial work as they
have the constant urge to log on to sites all day.

• Socialization process that the family used to be a part of is dwindling significantly. Due
to long hours of logging on to the virtual world, the children do not imbibe appropriate
social skills that are pertinent to the ‘real’ world.

• Lack of communication among the family members cause relationship setbacks, and
this is a principal problematic area in the society that has been generated due to long
hours of engagement in SNSs.

• People become indolent and overweight in many cases, sleep and eating disorders
become common issues as SM and SNSs makes one sit out for long unending hours
which is detrimental to healthy lifestyle.
 • Families’ encounters challenges that are attributable to SNSs as children and adolescent
are exposed to sexual and adult subject matters that may be inappropriate and for which
they might not be yet prepared for.

• SM and SNSs addiction lead to low grades in school or college that again is another
reason for frictions at home. Academic grades are found to slide down as students
engage in online games that would take up most of their study time. It is well known
that online games like "Blue Whale Challenge", a social network phenomenon dating
from 2016 has claimed several lives due to its suicide game tasks. It has harmed
personal relationships within the family units all across the world.

• Disproportionate engagement in SM and SNSs generate critical problems related to

family which may lead to marital discord as well, because chatting all night with
strangers may make either of the couples go astray, cheat on each other and also
commit adultery.

• Excessive indulgence to SM and SNSs not only impinge on personal relationships but
also affect livelihood/work and its quality, many risk getting fired from their jobs and
that may again be a reason for straining relations within the family set up. It has been
found in studies that employees spend valuable time on SNSs during their work hours.

• Breach in family relations can occur, if people are not cautious about what data or
information are being shared on the Internet via SM. With hacking becoming a
common issue, there can be identity theft and other security issues for the individual.

• SM and SNSs may also be responsible for causing damage to one’s reputation, anti-
social elements lurk around on SM and people who are in the habit of constant “Status
Update” may fall prey to such forces and bring themselves to danger. There are several
instances where terror organizations have groomed young people to join them and wage
war against nation. It therefore cuts them off from family and friends who are there real
well wishers.

Objectives:

1. To examine the impacts of Social Networking engagement via Social Media on

individuals.
2. To consider specifically those areas that has crashed within the parameters of family
communication due to the increased use of Social Media platforms by family members.
Hypothesis:

1. Social Media has affected a great deal of humanity and its multifarious impacts are
discernible in lifestyle changes.
2. Social Network Sites (SNSs) are increasingly being used and hence there is a need to
understand the SNS appropriation process towards family communication and its
impacts on personal relationships.

Methodology: This study explores the dynamics of social media and its impacts on personal
relationships that exist within a family or a household. It is based on the framework of
increased engagement with social media through social networking sites and how affects have
been discerned in personal relationships within family units across the spectrum.

Findings or /Impacts:

As technology surges forward, increased number of people are found to use and experience it,
which is leading to this unique type of addiction the, SM and SNSs addiction. The impact and
influence of SM and SNSs on families has been both negative and positive. However, it is an
increasing concern that technology has infiltrated our emotions and has infringed upon normal
family communication. SM in many ways has deprived children of attention, communication,
and a feeling of love, security and safety within the family unit. Children in a particular had
reported that they felt their parents were addicted to their phone or computer. Children stated
a desire for their parents to spend quality time and interact with them. This study shows the
need for family social interaction and the lines are blurred on when is enough with SM.10

We know that too much absorption in SM and SNSs can bring on damaging impact as human
communication channels gradually close, or rather zero interaction between members of the
family at the level of siblings, couples, or parent-child. It deprives the personal relationships to
be nurtured, blocks any type of family of learning and bonding, the role of the family as a
socialization agent is demolished and it fails miserably in developing interpersonal
relationships.

Parents multiply the gadgets that are being used and children also follow suit. Children start
using more and more device and these include smart phones, television, computers, tablets and
video games. Children are very impressionable what imbibe they are see and are taught.

As personal relationships and interactions take a back seat it is found that the family members
of Internet addicts may go through emotions of isolation or abandonment and fast segregation
from the real world occurs. Personal relationships are no more crucial and looked forward for.

10 Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books, 2011.
This may generate a feeling of frustration as behaviors and approach towards life becomes
increasingly inexplicable to other family members.

Mental health issues like depression and anxiety crop up and people struggle to adjust. Sleep
disorders and insomnia becomes It is common for Internet addicts to experience insomnia, too
which impacts family relations negatively.

The Indian Scene:

India with one of the largest youngest populations in the world remains the leading markets for
smartphone and mobile internet usage globally. Morgan Stanley11 reports that India is also
soon going to become one of the biggest markets in terms of new smartphone users as most
first-time internet users are leaping directly to mobile internet use platforms. The report added
that the total number of Internet users in India is forecast to exceed 600 million by 2020.

According to RedSeer Consulting12 only 10% of the 500 million Indians with access to the
internet are savvy enough to use online services like retail, travel-booking, and food ordering,
among others. The following table is telltale:

Stage of Online Number of

Description
Maturity Users
0 Access to internet 500 million
1 WhatsApp, facebook and other SM platforms 250 million
2 Google, Wikipedia, E-mail etc 200million
3 Banking and basic paid services like recharge 165 million
Consumer Internet including online retail, travel and
4 50 million
food delivery inter alia
Table Source: RedSeer Consulting.

Nearly half the internet users have social media accounts. People get involved in SM and SNSs
because it is a matter of habit, and ultimately habit becomes our second nature.

Conclusion:

SM through SNSs has taken control the lives of many youngsters. This obsession is almost like
an un-missable sense of duty in their lives that they are constrained to keep up with, this
compulsiveness, over and over again lug them away from the duties in life. The bulk of
teenagers are fanatical, they engage in spin doctoring and judge themselves against others who
they add to their friends list on SNSs. This constant urge to keep pace with virtual world in the
long run forms depressive emotions and triggers low self-esteem in many teens. Family and
11Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company.
12 RedSeer is one of the largest and the most widely quoted internet focused consulting firms in India.
familial ties takes a beating as the teenagers seldom have a break from the relentless streaming
of social media updates because their mobile phones have for all practical purposes become an
integral part of their physical existence. Any attempt to disconnect them from their smart
phones or computers is to take apart their lives.

Dealing and managing excessive attachment to SM and SNSs is a tough job; therapy and
counseling are general resolutions. Support of family members is often enlisted to get involved
in the therapeutic process that can be very daunting. In extreme cases medication becomes
imperative, during the clinical management of depression, anxiety and insomnia.

Today it is widely accepted that SM and SNSs are ordinarily part and parcel of a teenager’s
life, for many of them the world they exist is necessarily not for their progress and
development, they lose out on family ties, and personal relationships within family become a
casualty. Society, parents are therefore duty bound to intently nurture their self worth focusing
on achievements of their life stages. It needs to be drilled into their psyche that success does
not have a short cut, working hard up the way of life is satisfying and it is not tough if people
are consistent in their efforts and above all family relationships are primary that have no
replacement.

“Today, spend a little time cultivating relationships offline.

Never forget that everybody isn't on social media”
- Germany Kent

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