Facebook has been in the news more than I can count recently, due in part to movies like The Social Network and privacy scandals involving how Facebook uses their users' data. However, one thing that Facebook does not get much coverage for, positive or negative, is how Facebook affects relationships. The relationship status is something we take for granted on Facebook today. According to the movie, the idea of marking who is taken and who is not was not part of the original plan, but rather came in a sleep-deprived state from Mark Zuckerberg. But today, the relationship status is one key pieces of information people use when looking at the profiles of people of the opposite sex.
In older days, to find out if someone is single or taken, one had to ask. Now, information is shoved in our faces. What does this do for communication? The level of communication required to have any information about somebody has now been significantly reduced. What people do on Facebook when "investigating" a potential love interest now would be considered stalking only a decade or so ago, but now it is the norm, the requirement for staying ahead in the "game". As a result, people are losing the ability to talk to other people. This is an alarming result: if people cannot talk to one another in the real world, imagine the ramifications this will have on the dating scene and intimacy in the future. An interesting trend that would be the subject of a much larger study is the dual rise of both technology usage and divorce rates. It would seem that the increase in Facebook communications, and even texting and phone calls, has reduced the ability of humankind to communicate and resolve problems in the real world.
Its not all bad however. There are definitely upsides to the level of communication that Facebook provides. Facebook allows communication with people that would normally never hear from us again. It also gives us information that gives us the means to establish communication in the real world. However, all this communication ability is pointless if we do not continue to communicate and establish skills in communication in the real world, or else relationships, which one could argue are hinged on communication, will not survive nearly as well.
I definitely agree that Facebook and other newer forms of social entertainment are decreasing our ability to to talk and communicate to one another. This especially holds true when it comes to texting. Instead of calling someone or talking face to face, people prefer texting where there is little or no emotion and you can think out responses before talking back to someone. Who knows how the next generation will communicate to each other.
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