The Negative Effects Of The Internet On Relationships
Ever since the internet became common, there has been a discussion about its influence on social wellbeing.
There are two groups involved in the debate about internet use. The first group are those who maintain that , with social media sites like Facebook, the internet has allowed people to enrichen their social lives more than ever before. On the other hand are those who maintain that the increased time people spent bouncing around on the web have become more and more excluded from others, and are getting an inadequate amount of true socialization.
Science is now beginning to have its say.
Research done at the Stockholm School of Economics looked at the correlation between peoples’ use of the internet and how they scored on a variety of various measures of social wellbeing, such as emotional wellbeing and work life balance.
Dr. Elizabeth Engleberg, lead author in the study, learned that individuals with who used the internet the most often were considerably lonelier as shown in these adultfrienedfinder app reviews and had poorer work life balance than those with less internet use.
This evidence strongly substantiates the perspective that the social media cannot stand in for true human interactions. It seems that no matter how much people interact online, they don’t find the true human connections that they long for.
Also, it seems that too much use of the internet also stops people from building the skills they needed to connect with others. Dr. Engelberg discovered that individuals who spent a lot of time online had lower scores on scales of emotional intelligence and social skills.
It is misfortunate that individuals who most need to learn how to interact with others are the ones online the most.
Unfortunately, that intuitively makes sense: if people find it difficult to connect with others, they are less enclined to engage in social interaction. Instead, they spend their time in solitary activities, such as surfing the web.
But by doing so, these individuals have no opportunity to improve their social skills. They’ve entered a downhill slide, where they spend increasing time online and become lonelier, but never feel comfortable interacting with others.
To escape this downward cycle, people need to turn their computers off, interact, and create true human bonds with others.
As Dr. Engleberg’s study exhibited, this is critically important. Evermore so, in a world where people are spending increasing time on their computers.