Can Social Networking Kill Your Relationship?

You must have seen it, a married couple sitting in a coffee bar, where one of them is reading the newspaper and the other is staring into space.

Not a word is spoken. They may as well be on different planets! You might laugh to yourself ironically thinking, “Is this how relationships end up after 10 or 20 years?”

Well now, the latest technology can radically shorten this time period.

There are many online social media websites, which permit a community of internet users to connect with each other:

Facebook, Bebo, Flickr, Digg, Orkut, and Myspace, to name but a few.

Currently, social networking is the number one activity on the internet.

Allow me to put it into perspective:

It took radio 38 years to achieve 100 million users.

Television achieved this in 13 years.

The internet reached this figure in only 4 years.

Facebook has added 100 million users in LESS THAN 9 MONTHS!

80% of Twitter useage is conducted on mobile devices, meaning people update anywhere and at anytime!

There are over 200 million blogs with 54% of bloggers posting content and tweeting daily.

So we can see from this that social networking, far from being a fad is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Much of the population strives for 24-hour internet access and there are many ways of doing so. The Blackberry was once nicknamed the Crackberry because it was so addictive.

So social networking is here to stay and is, without question, an invaluable dating tool. You may not know this but one in eight marriages in the US are by people who met online!

That being said, we must maintain autonomy in the use of social networking tools and avoid being drawn into the “herd mentality” of revealing our innermost life secrets to our online community, just because everyone else does.

Psychologists call this tendency to determine appropriate behaviour by observing others “social proof,” and it may partially explain the exponential growth of online social media sites.

The need to “fit in” and be connected with shared beliefs is normal, but when individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking is secondary to the cohesiveness of an online “group,” these apparently innocuous signs could suggest the insidious beginnings of a not so harmless cult.

So you’re in the coffee shop with your new date, chuckling at the jaded married couple sitting a few tables away from you.

Their behaviour reminiscent of George A. Romero’s classic depiction of the Zombie genre, where his hopeless undead protagonists continued to congregate in places that they did whilst they were still alive, blindly performing actions purely by repetitive reflex.

You feel the need to immediately publish this observation on your blog.

Your date, who is both irritated and ignored pulls out his cellphone and posts the photo of you grinning at your device, so that all his Facebook followers can share his misery. You both sit in silence.

So whereas online social networking is a welcome advance in modes of communication, sometimes you should leave your phone tucked away and enjoy some old fashioned conversation, resisting the urge to share the account with your 900+ online friends, assigning the experience purely to memory.

Oh, and yes, I am on Facebook…look me up.

More from Beresford LeRoy Davis can be found at www.therightguyforme.com

Tagged as: beresford leroy davis, books, facebook, issue 2, relationships, romance, social networking, the right guy for me, twitter