Social media and relationships
A particularly pernicious concern is whether time spent on social media is eating into time spent face-to-face, a phenomenon known as social displacement.
Fears of social displacement have been around for a long time, as old as the telephone and probably older. “This displacement problem has been going on for over 100 years,” says Jeffrey Hall, PhD, director of the Relations and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. “No matter what technology is used,” says Hall, there is still a “cultural belief that it replaces face-to-face time with our close friends and family.”
Hall's research challenges this cultural belief. In one study, participants kept a daily diary of time spent doing 19 different activities during weeks when they were asked or not asked to refrain from using social media. During the weeks people took time off from social media, they spent more time browsing the internet, working, cleaning, and doing household chores. However, during these same periods of abstention, there was no difference in the amount of time people spent socializing with their strongest social ties.
The result ? “I tend to believe, based on my own work and reading that of others, that there is very little evidence that social media directly replaces meaningful interactions with close relational partners,” says Hall. One possible reason for this is that we tend to interact with our loved ones through several different modalities, such as text messages, emails, phone calls, and in-person time.
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