Essay: Why Online Networks Are Destroying Modern Relationships By Creating Digital Addiction

Within our social media-centric world, social media has become the core approach we socialize with our peers.

source: framer.website

What launched as rudimentary connection platforms for maintaining contact has deteriorated into something infinitely more convoluted.

The Social Media Facade

Undoubtedly the most devastating attribute of social media is how it nurtures constant comparison.

Each update through our feeds buries us with skillfully designed highlight reels of other people’s lives.

We spot incredible adventures, beautiful love stories, exceptional growth, and amazing children.

Simultaneously, our actual reality seem unremarkable by reference.

This endless bombardment to enhanced experiences breeds impossible standards for our own relationships.

The Cognitive Exploitation Framework

Networking platforms have been strategically built to consume our concentrated effort.

Every detail is strategically adjusted to control our behavior.

Continuous refresh, frequent disruptions, and targeted stimulation collaborate to construct obsessive patterns.

The ongoing excitement reshapes our consciousness to thirst for rapid validation.

In instances we’re not feeling frequent online gratification, we encounter anxious, apathetic, or withdrawn.

The Relationship Poison

Most troublingly is how electronic communication interferes with sincere intimacy.

Sincere communication relies on absolute awareness, heartfelt communication, and exclusive attention together.

Technological mediums manufactures hindrances to each crucial component.

During precious time, relentless notifications command our awareness away from our loved one physically present.

Instead of participating in deep conversations, we find ourselves mechanically swiping through electronic information.

In place of our actual experiences and perceptions, we get consumed with capturing our adventures for virtual promotion.

The Online Acceptance Addiction

Online social systems has morphed the way we crave appreciation and personal value.

Where we once developed our individual value from concrete outcomes, mental advancement, and authentic bonds, we presently realize we’re obsessively seeking virtual recognition.

Appreciation tokens, input, circulations, and attachments morph into our fundamental standards for judging our personal value.

This technological affirmation changes to compulsive because it’s shifting, passing, and fundamentally empty.

Varying from significant breakthroughs or valuable relationships, electronic acknowledgment offers only fleeting happiness.

The Echo Chamber Effect

Electronic preference systems have been manufactured to deliver to us information that suits our established views.

This establishes viewpoint isolation where we’re perpetually presented to content that confirms what we currently carry.

In conjunction with this, contradictory viewpoints are screened out, creating an habitually isolating societal context.

This compartmentalization pervades our human bonds, breeding exceptional levels of animosity between peers, genetic relatives, and life companions.

The Social Competition Arena

Technological interfaces has strengthened our innate inclination to measure ourselves to others.

What traditionally was constrained within evaluating ourselves to family members has extended to reach countless unknown people in every corner.

STATS ABOUT DIVORCES/RELATIONSHIPS

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm

https://www.familyrelationships.gov.au/separation

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1441&context=studentpub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_divorce