Article Review : Your Internet Friends Are Real

Picture this, kids are sitting around a table on their devices,not saying a word to each other. Today's society is replacing friends with technology. "Is Technology Killing Our Friendships?" states that people are constantly checking their virtual world and not interacting with each other. It also states they are spending too much time online and mistaking real friendships for online

In the reading “Hooking Up on The Internet,” two sociologists argue about the uses of meeting people online, or dating online. Zuboff and Raney argued about the “multiple realities” of online dating; Zuboff describes is as an ‘uncomfortable isolation’ and Raney said that it ‘expands social networks.’ All in all, the two men are both right about interactions on the internet. Meeting new people on the internet was easier for otherwise antisocial individuals, whom could have many, long conversations with comfort, yet most people would prefer to eventually meet their new friend or partner in person. This is an example of the isolation. But in chatrooms full of diverse people, who could talk to each other for hours, people could open up to those

You can register yourself at a number of online dating services and enter some specifics about yourself and your interests, and magically you can see profiles of other singles just like yourself. They say internet connecting is safe, anonymous, less visually oriented, and gives people a chance to share many views and ideas without investing large amounts of time, money, and emotions. Like traditional dating, the variables are pretty much the same. The only thing that is different is the approach and the ease at being able to find a large number of potential mates without actually dating them first. Granted, some people did find true love via this medium, but I think that a lot of people need to be smart enough to stick with dating real people instead of virtual personalities.

In Faux Friendship, by William Deresiewicz, his argument is that friendships in today’s time are different from earlier times. He argues in his essay that social media websites have destroyed our chances of having real friendships. Also, he claims that technology in general is making us stray away from the actual time it we can spend with real friends. We believe that having more Facebook friends makes us feel good about the number of friends we have. Are these truly our friends?

The article Electronic Intimacy by Christine Rosen talks about the relationships people have with the online world and how it affects relationships because everything is just so fast. The purpose this article was written is to give her audience which is people who use social media to experience an actual in person relationship because the only relationship we know today lies in a direct message. Rosen poses a question to her audience that has us all thinking and also is her thesis. The question says “But does the way we communicate with each other alter that experience significantly?” (Paragraph 5). But it makes sense because in today’s world there is no such thing as personal relationships which is why Rosen states that “We are living in an

The book talks about how internet can deepen friendships, using social media to become more aware of a friend’s day to day life. (Berger, 204, p. 551-552). Social media helps most friendships, I always loved seeing the pictures my friends would post while we were apart as it almost allowed me to be with them or sometimes my friends would post pictures of us together just to say they missed me. As my friends and I have graduated high school and entered college, we may not see eachother very much within a year. Social media is one thing that allows us to always keep in touch. We may not see eachother everyday like before but things like snapchat allow us to stay in touch. Technology really has been able to form and improve friendships. Along with keeping in touch, social media also helped me reconnect with friends Id lost contact with. My senior year of high school one of my friends from second grade reached out to me via social media. We met up one day and out friendship rekindled, I gained another valuable friendship because of social media. According to the book the fear of internet causing isolation is false, if anything internet users seem to have more friends than nonusers (Berger,

Ellison et al believed that Facebook is a ‘rich site’ for research into the quality of relationships due its ‘heavy usage patterns’ and the mechanics of how it is more about offline to online relationships due the nature of the creation of the site, for university students to communicate. Facebook in incredibly different from other CMC as many users actually know most their ‘friends’ in real terms on the site.

Survival in high school can be tricky at best, horrific and stressful in the least. However, there have been many guides for high schoolers, especially 11th and 12th graders to traverse those difficult hallways. In Jay Mathews article, he uses delightful humor in order to help students overcome those difficulties.

Face to face relationships are very important because through contact we are getting live interaction, trust, honesty, and integrity. Face to face conversations are more positive and more reliable than friendships online. In cyber space you convers ate with friends but some will not acknowledge the friendship in public. Social media is slowly taking away from face to face relationships, because we contact our family and friends on the computer screen. We are typing while looking at the screen instead of seeing facial expressions. Therefore, we aren’t sure if they are interpreting what we are saying in a negative or positive way.

In recent years, social penetration theory has been the focus of many online studies,and has been applied to, or adapted, in the context of online relationship studies, such as sexual self-disclosure, online friendships, and online social networks. (Tang & Wang, 2012) The social penetration theory as Joseph DeVito writes in The Interpersonal Communication Book is a theory not of why relationships develop but of what happens when they do develop (DeVito, 2016, p. 237). While there are a few concepts that are encompassed in the definition of social penetration theory, there are two prominent parts and they are, breadth and depth. The breadth of a relationship refers to the amount of topics you and your partner talk about, and depth refers to the degree to which you penetrate the inner personality—the core—of the other individual (DeVito, 2016). In simpler terms, “how do you let people in,” and “how much and how in depth do you go into a topic?” Let it be known, however, that there is such thing as a withdrawal between the amount of breadth and depth communicated between individuals in a relationship. Such a concept is known as depenetration. While there will be a fairly low amount of attention paid to this concept, it’s important to understand that this contrast of social penetration exists.

Nowadays, making friends on internet has been popular throughout the world. People search for new friends, soul mates, or confidants. The internet has become an important tool to connect people with each other. Since the internet is so convenient, making friends may no longer be a problem. On the other hand, Internet Friendship may lead to some troubles because some people make get cheated online. I strongly disagree with the establishment of relationships through internet because I think friends on internet friends are different from real life friends. No one knows what their purpose is. From my past experience, the relationship with internet friends does not last long because they often come and go easily. There are some negative effects

Are online friends “real friends”? Many people think they are not. However, is that the truth? No, the real truth is that online friends are good and real friends, and important to have. Of the numerous reasons as to why they are important, three of them stand out from the rest. A sum of those three reasons, in no particular order, is that having online friends can help people be more social, it can help those who cannot make friends be able to make friends due to a number of reasons, and it increases the number of friends people have in general.

Aside from expediting relationships, there is the factor of getting to know someone for who they really are. In social networks, “the CliffsNotes of a person's life will never give you an accurate representation of the reality. We create the image that we want to convey through our activity on social media. It's much easier to convey the "reality" that we want to portray on the Internet than to live it in real life.” (Curry, 2013). People often put the best things about themselves on their social network; in fact many show the life they wish they had. This can be detrimental to relationships, because no one is ever transparent or honest. In considering relationships, “the truth is that the content and character of a person should be revealed in layers. The development of a fruitful relationship takes effort, and it is impossible to reach a level of depth with a person by meticulously parsing his Facebook self” (Curry, 2013). Real relationships and depth cannot be established when merely built online.

Social media improves the way people communicate with others. It allows them to meet new people. At the click of a button, millions of strangers all over the world who would have never met otherwise are able to connect with each other. Many people believe that internet friends are not as valuable as real life friendships. However with websites like “skype” and instant messaging sites, long distance friendships can be as intimate as real life friendships because social media allows friends to see each other face to face and spend quality time together whenever they want to. Because of this, internet friendships should no longer be considered taboo and should be seen as normal human relationships, “It’s entirely possible to have hundreds of

So, it seems as though cyber relationships have become fairly common, but the question remains to be asked.......is online dating all it's cracked up to be?