The Limits Of Friendship By Maria Konnikova

I feel that friendships have changed dramatically from what they used to be years ago. I can remember being a child who didn’t have a phone and the only talking I did with my friends was at school. The text message has taken the effort out of a friendship. When we wanted to talk with a friend we had to actually have a face-to-face meeting and spend quality time with them. Now with a few key strokes and a little bit of time, we can send a long paragraph of what information we are wanting to share. The text message has enabled us to spend less time with the physical relationship with our friends and give us more time to be able to do the more important things in our life. William Deresiewicz states “Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling” and I could not agree more. The amount of effort we put into a friendship is defined by how much time we have available to spend on our Facebook page talking to others.

Maria Konnikova, a New York Times best-selling author, is known for contributing scientific and psychological factors into her works, which has been published on several online publications such as Salon, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. (Konnikova 235). In her essay “Limits of Friendship”, she goes into depth about the number of friends that one can have overall based off Robin Dunbar theory and how technology is impacting not only his theory, but our social lives also. Based on Robin Dunbar research, he believes that a typical individual has one hundred and fifty people in their social group in which he differentiates in his “rule of three”. As technology advances, the way individuals interact with one another is through social media and their smart devices, but we’re slowly losing our focus on how to socialize with one another. Technology is making it easier to build relationships with those around the world, but harder with those around us.

In the last ten to fifteen years accompanying the dawn of social media, means of communication among friends and strangers have been easier than ever. Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has grown into the largest social media site on the Internet with 30 million users and counting. The ability to catch up with former high school friends who are now across the country or see how an aunt in Pittsburgh has been doing since the birth of her son are now as simple as the click of a mouse. However, the amount of “friends” acquired on social media may not be an accurate reflection of how many close relationships one truly shares. In an article from Bigthink.com titled “Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends?”, Steven Mazie gathers research from Pew Research Center about statistics surrounding Facebook

Today’s young adults have a lack of communication with friends and family because of technology such as social media, video games or television. In our society, parlor walls can be seen as those commodities. The large flat screen tv’s or IPads are today’s enthusiast. “Social media in our country and the globalizing world has become the voice, eye, ear, heart, and memory of the individuals. It has aspects which strengthen, weaken and include communication between the individuals and also it provides convenience for time and place.” This, according to TNS Digital Life Research that carried out a study in 2011 and held 1.938.059.098 people that were online. Researchers were able to test how many people prefer to communicate through social media or rather be involved in some sort of social media instead of actually going out and interacting. These studies show and give a glimpse of how many people are more interested to spend time on social media instead of building new relationships. Bradbury’s society and our society and similar because of the lack of communication we have because of some aspects of technology that are similar, which are the parlor walls and social media, television and video games.

The ease with which people are able to share and communicate over the Internet has had the effect that people no longer feel the need to interact in with one another in person because they feel that everything they want to do can be done over the Internet. An example can be seen in “Connectivity and its Discontents”, where we are introduced to Randy (Turkle 621). Randy’s younger sister was recently engaged to be married, something that most people would consider a significant event. She and her fiance decided to make the announcement to their family and friends via e-mail, something that made Randy feel very far away from his sister emotionally. Social media can also have the effect that constantly updating our information and giving second by second updates on the ordinary events of our daily

With the rapid growth of social media it is becoming very effortless to determine the type of characteristics someone holds based off of what they post and with whom they interact with. In Maria Konnikova’s The Limits Of Friendship, she furthers her readers knowledge about the use of social media and why it is important for organizations to have them. Generally, every person and organization obtain some form of a social media account that outlines what values they promote. Make A Wish Foundation is a very prominent worldwide organization which enhances the lives of sick children with serious conditions by giving them a wish. Looking over their twitter will give a great insight on how they enrich everyday lives by posting tweets and photos which also display the ambition and size of this organization which makes that possible. Make A Wish promotes giving happiness and a sense of life to an unfortunate child in an attempt to have its organizational values support it’s name.

In the present day scenario, people opt a visual device with over a four-inch ready to view the world through a social lens rather than having a conversation with beautiful human faces. Nevertheless, a great philosopher once told “Human Beings are social animals”, they seek out companionship as part of their own wellbeing. Author of “Don’t Miss your Life” about the spirit of full-tilt living, Joe Robinson, discusses how technology “pushes the virtual friend” to create social isolation in his article, “Is Social Networking Destroying Our Social Lives?” which is published in The Huffington Post. The language of the text creates a straightforward diction, however, it is factual and informative. Robinson effectively convinces to try and interact with other people and improve the social life through the use of statistics and expert opinions paired with emotional stories.

The article “Social Media as Community” “We no longer lose social ties over our lives; we have Facebook friends forever.” (Keith Hampton) Social media has created amazing apps that let us meet people that are exactly how we are ourselves. They have helped many students get relationships that they thought would never happen. “There is little evidence that social media is responsible for a trend of isolation, or a loss of intimacy and social support.” “Social Networking Sites and Our lives.” On the internet there is little evidence that social media has caused an isolation. The internet has made it where we can talk to people far from here that are just like us and usually people don’t lose friends that are exactly like

Instant communication is an necessary part modern of life. Buried behind my everyday technology, I am able to communicate and stay up-to-date with friends’ lives without face-to-face interactions. Social media seems to eliminate the need to think about what is being said or the effect of the communication on readers. Countless hours spent tweeting do not require any more thought than how to simply make clever comments for the public to read. The only real way to dig deeper is to actually make an effort to overcome what has now become the awkwardness of talking directly to an online “friend.” A willingness to go beyond the false relationship of social media is important to broadening the understanding of self and the world.

Maria Konnikova's essay "The Limits of Friendship," analyzes the impact of social media on close relationships, addressing the people impacted by social media use. This essay published in The New Yorker, a weekly magazine with scholarly authors, to inform the public on social media's impact on our lives. She finds that social media has created a dependency on technology and online interactions. Konnikova strives to inform that social media is decreasing close relationships, and persuades that it will impact our future. She argues on the impact of increased dependency on social media on the Dunbar number, hindering the development of future generations. Konnikova succeeds using strong logic and scientific reason as well as appealing to emotions; however, she fails to prove her credibility over the topic and instead relies on the credibility of Robin Dunbar.

Technology is a great tool and it can make it easy for us to stay in touch with our friends. A student of Sree Sreenivasan, moved from New York to live abroad for 10 years, she told Sree that social media, more specifically Facebook, made moving back to New York easier, because she had still been connected with her friends through Facebook, so she knew what they had been up to while she was away (Doc 2). With that being said, technology provides a sense of connectedness. However there is a downside, research shows that communication online that contains low substance, can occasionally make us lonely (Doc 1). In addition to that we cannot be alone any more, we feel the need to check our phones whenever there is nothing to do.

The emergence of new communication tools such as phones, televisions, and computers along with internet are constantly changing the way people live and communicate. Many new information technology, especially the internet, pulled distance between people closer because human communication will no longer be constrained by time and space. People can talk through the internet or participate in online discussion group at every corner of the world; thus, enhanced human social connections. However, this is not what every human believes. People who opposed these thinking tend to believe that the internet is what lead to human outliers – isolated -- since people spend daily social activities times on the internet. 人们已把网络科技当做是自己不可少的一部分。所以有人失去了面对面交流的能力。

Humans are naturally social beings. Jeremy Rifkin states, “We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows (115).” The article continues to explain how humans seem to connect through emotions and that inner, neurological need for human interaction. When one person feels pain, joy, or sadness, they want to share their feelings with another person. Hence, the needing fulfillment of social interaction. However, the use of social media does not mean humans have become less social. Even though social media has introduced a new way of interacting and communicating, studies have shown that people are becoming more

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Instagram, and Flicker was invented to keep us in touch and keep us closer to our family and friends. But according to How Facebook ruins Friendships “we took our friendship online” (Bernstein). First we began communicating more by email than by phone and then switched to instant messaging or texting. By joining social Medias 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