“These days, many of us spend more time online than in the actual world. Classes, meetings, and birthday celebrations are all held in cramped rectangles. And many of us switch out the work computer for a different one after spending the day staring at a screen.
In the new digital age, this is exhilarating entertainment.”
Digital life is, simply, real life. The reality of living with technology, especially in computerized/ digital form, is occasionally described as a stoked reality(Jurgenson, 2012a), which means that digital technology has enhanced, or stoked, the terrain to a significant extent. For people who live in technology- ferocious societies, this happens all the time. But the verity is that indeed before the age of robotization, life has been stoked by technology.
From the foremost of times, mortal beings have created tools that would enable them to make harbors, use fire, populate the natural world, transmit information to one another, and defend their homes — in short, to do whatever it took to survive. As is bandied in Chapter 2 of Chapter 2 of Superconnected, the invention of spoken and also written languages allowed people to make lesser sense of the raw marvels they encountered every day and to communicate in decreasingly further abstract and complex ways across time and space. People have always used tools and technologies to make and compound their societies. In ultramodern societies, all kinds of ICTs enable the transmission of generalities and ideas.
A lot of the original excitement around social media platforms over the last few decades arose from a rather idealistic notion of their capacity to facilitate interactions that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Individuals can use social media to "meet," connect, and work with others in organizations and countries that would otherwise be inaccessible. Microblogs, for example, facilitated certain political activities in the Middle East during Arab Spring in 2011, while social networking sites allow people with uncommon medical disorders to share information and support. Online contacts are at the root of the establishment of new organizations as well as the emergence of fresh social links among existing communities.
Online experiences, and the social connections and environments created with the assistance of digital technologies, are critical components of modern techno-social life in which people’s responses are genuine, meaningful, and often profound. When we are online, our brains and bodies think and feel, and act. We may experience bodily fatigue or pain, worry or be delighted, make a friend or become involved in an altercation, strengthen a relationship or destroy one. What a person does online influences the rest of one’s life because it is a part of that life, not a separate thing. It is important, then, to think about and describe this environment in ways that highlight its realness—for example, not to call the face-to-face realm IRL (which means “in real life” and wrongly promotes the idea that the face-to-face sphere is more real than the digital).
In my interviews with people who find and form connections over the internet, I heard many descriptions of how unexpectedly deep and authentic these connections could become. For example, a member of an online group dedicated to academics told me, that I’ve come to recognize, and sometimes, to like very much. This has nothing to do with spelling or mental brilliance or even depth of faith, for that matter. I think what draws me to some people here is their authenticity and their willingness to be imperfect. But even the ones I don’t especially like have touched my heart to the extent that I sometimes worry about them and wish I could reach through the computer and help them, somehow. Now that I think about it, it is amazing how real some of these distant, unseen, frequently anonymous message board posters have become. But, of course, they are real! (Chayko, 2002, p. 114)
There is a long-held, widespread myth that social media-enabled online interactions replace, compete with, or otherwise decrease traditional relationships (Wang & Wellman, 2010). One prevalent issue is that kids are not gaining crucial communication and social skills since they exclusively connect through social media features such as pokes, tweets, and SMS. Similar issues have been raised concerning social gatherings in public places such as restaurants and parks when people are present but ignoring one another because they are distracted by their mobile devices. Such tales reinforce the notion that online social media interactions may replace and harm offline engagement and relationships.
Although there are circumstances in which social media networks permit new and/or replace offline interactions, it is more frequent for online relationships to supplement offline ones (Wang & Wellman, 2010). In the 1980s and 1990s, studies of online communities, email, and discussion forums suggested that social media-enabled online relationships were poor substitutes, associated with dysfunctional interaction behaviors (e.g., flaming), loss of identity cues, feeble relationships with family members living under the same roof, smaller friendship groups, and increased levels of depression and hopelessness.
The authentic and deeply particular nature of the connections and communities that are formed in digital spaces has been a common theme throughout my exploration. People also told me that they felt that they could get to know veritably well indeed those individuals whom they encountered simply online, absent any face-to-face commerce. In response to my request for a description of the “ particular ” nature of the online relationship, one youthful woman mused,
How can it be particular? It feels like it is. However, “Oh, gee, If people said. I wouldn’t say, “
Oh well, I met him formally. ” I’d say, “ Oh yes, I know him.”(Chayko, 2002,p. 86)
Because online social connections are so frequently endured as absolutely real and deeply particular, it's but a coming step to perceive digitally encountered others to be present. The internet and digital media grease the perception and experience of propinquity and presence in ways that transcend the physical. When connecting online, those with whom we connect are frequently perceived to be “ really there.” This sense that the other is “ really there ” is called social presence. According to the social presence proposition advanced by communication scholars John Short, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie, a communication medium can feed its druggies several ways to come apprehensive of one another’s presence. They can know one another’s rates, characteristics, and inner countries and begin to perceive and witness one another as socially present( Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976). This proposition, which anteceded the internet and digital media, has ago been streamlined to explain the variety of ways that people can use these technologies to be cognitively present to one another indeed as they're physically distant(see Chayko, 2002). Feeling the nearness or presence of others across distances has been called perceived propinquity(O’Leary, Wilson, & Metiu, 2014) and, when electronic media facilitates the connection, electronic contiguity( Korzenny, 1978; Walther & Barazova, 2008). In a large-scale transnational study, professors of business Michael O’Leary, Jeanne Wilson, and Anca Metiu set up that associates working hundreds of long hauls piecemeal from one another communicated as frequently, on average, as associates who were located in the same office. Also, associates separated by distance felt the same position of participated identity and sense of cognitive and affective closeness as those who worked together in the same position. individualities at work, the experimenters determined, can form strong bonds despite being separated by analogous goods that have been set up when popular culture is the interceding element among physically separated people. participating in common interests in a TV show, movie, or type of music can bring about a strong sense of participated identity and community among addicts. They, too, can come to feel that they inhabit a social world with one another. Artistic products and votes that can inspire similar involvement among druggies have an excellent chance of popular success. Communication and media professor Henry Jenkins calls this “ the art of world-making ”( 2006,p. 21; for further on this, see Chapter 9 of Superconnected).
Close relationships are defined by greater self-disclosure and the exchange of personal facts over time. However, the lack of face-to-face connection affects the verification of the information transmitted. Individuals can therefore easily construct false or misleading representations of themselves, supply false or misleading information, or purposely omit particular facts to reap personal gains. Some social media platforms are even designed to conceal an individual's genuine identity. Individuals in Virtual Worlds and other virtual worlds, for example, are represented by avatars whose visual image is purely fictitious. However, whether deliberate or unintentional, lying regarding self-identity can have negative consequences in the context of relationships. As a result, deception - which is easy to accomplish on social media networks - may result in the relationship being terminated.
It is common for time spent online to have an intimate, emotionally rich dynamic. Intimacies and emotions are exchanged profusely and nearly instantaneously online. In fact, they serve as a kind of “glue” for the relationships that form there. This “emotional glue” is especially important in the absence of the “physical glue” that face-to-face interaction can provide. Digital environments and the experiences created in them can be extremely, perhaps surprisingly, intimate. As social creatures who desire interpersonal closeness, human beings are highly creative in finding and forging intimacy, including in digital settings. While a wide variety of types of relationships can form online, spanning the spectrum of human intimacy, even the most fleeting of relationships can be highly intimate when those involved disclose a great deal about themselves and feel that they have come to understand much about the other person as well. It is this kind of personal disclosure and understanding and the positive progression of a relationship (even if it does not turn out to be especially long-term) that render it intimate and meaningful. Short-term relationships can be highly intimate, just as they can be offline.
Ending a relationship on social media requires no effort or direct interest. However, the reasons for ending a virtual relationship are generally less likely to be related to problems between relationship partners. Conflicts involving personal dispositions (e.g., one of the parties being inconsiderate) or particular actions (e.g., being late) may be less important in social media platforms, however excessive engagement might be regarded as unpleasant and lead to the dissolution of a relationship. Individuals are also more inclined to stop a relationship formally as a result of information overload produced by a partner's intensive communication activities, such as a steady stream of Twitter messages or Facebook updates.
The human need and desire to form intimate relationships is so strong that it happens all the time online, often without great difficulty. Smartphones and social media play a big part in this. Since many people take smartphones with them wherever they go, they can use small bits of time to check in on others and/or provide updates, whether by Facebook or Twitter, or some other social media platform. Interestingly, this is how intimacy tends to develop face-to-face as well—in the small, everyday moments of connection as much as in grand gestures and experiences. And with a device with which to connect and network always at one’s side, it has never been easier to remain in constant contact with others, even a large number of others, and to find that intimacy has developed, sometimes quite unexpectedly and swiftly (see Chayko, 2002, 2008; Fortunati, 2002; Fox, 2001).
However, analysing the usage and effect of social media networks necessitates acknowledging that human communication is not a single mechanical operation. How a social media system is utilized, what information is transferred, what interaction occurs, and how that information sharing affects individuals, and their behavior is all necessarily impacted by the relationships that people have with one another. Social media use and the connections it facilitates exist within the framework of family relationships, professional ties, partnerships, acquaintance relationships, and friendships. Understanding the full potential, impact, and limitations of social media platforms necessitates an examination of how they are affected by and affect human relationships. More than just information exchange, social media networks are important because of the ways they leverage and transform relationships. Emotional responses in technology use are, thus, a complex process. Of course, all mortal relations are complex, messy, changeable, and fraught with threat. exemplification, unfortunate, indeed fatal issues of digitally- told emotional responses for illustration, connections that have ended at the suggestion of online infidelity or lives that have ended when online bullying or public embarrassment came too important to take. Events that take place in a digital terrain have profound consequences for people and are, again, incontrovertibly real.
