Social Media Is Training You To Form Bad Relationships
How Can You Counteract that Training?
Social media trains us to form poor relationships. We learn to feed our hunger for instant gratification through the likes and kudos we get on social platforms. This is due to the rationalizing process that happens in our mind: “If X number of people like my post, then that means I’m a likable person.”
There’s been a lot of discussion over the last couple of years about social media and its effect on our relationships. Things like Facebook “friending”, Twitter “following” and Instagram tagging are all standard tactics in keeping up with old friends, making new friends, ex-lovers, business associates, and future spouses (depending on what social media platform you prefer). And while these digital placeholders let us stay in touch with people we see every day, they also teach us how to treat people.
How Does Social Media View Relationships?
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are training us to treat our relationships with a superficiality that is out of sync with human nature and destructive to genuine connections.
The social media platforms we use condition us to focus on the quantity of relationships instead of their quality and depth.
