Shifts in Our Relationship Maintenance Behaviors
Relationship maintenance refers to the difference in behaviors displayed by a member of that relationship in effort to maintain the relationship. All relationships require maintenance, whether it is to call your best friend every day or to have dinner with your mom every Tuesday night; these are behaviors we perform in order to preserve, maintain, and sustain the quality in a relationship. Though, as social media grows in popularity, individuals, specifically college students, are starting to use social media to maintain their relationships with others. Kandell indicated that “college students as a group appear more vulnerable to developing a dependence on the Internet than most segments of society”(14) in order to maintain their relationships with family and friends back home. Sponcil and Gitimu reported that majority of college students frequently checked their social networking sites multiple times a day (qtd. in Sheldon;Quan-Haase and Young)…writing on Facebook walls and checking status updates in order to interact and communicate with friends and family (8). Considering this, frequency plays an essential role in regards to social media use, specifically because it can influence an individual’s interpersonal relationship (Porter et al. 4). When we begin to constantly and frequently check on our social networking sites, it becomes routine, which creates this dependence and reliance on social media to facilitate communication, and therefore shifts relationship maintenance behaviors.
Frequently visiting your social networking sites multiple times a day sacrifices “… other valuable activities such as face-to-face communication [or telephone calls] without providing appropriate functions for facilitating social relations, thereby limiting actual social relations” (Ahn and Shin 2453). These routine-like behaviors, like frequently checking and updating Facebook statuses, is where the shifts in maintenance behaviors are becoming noticeable. Social media is seen to “...serve as surrogacy of having [actual] social relations.... “ (Ahn and Shin 2553). Individuals are beginning to replace and even sacrifice valuable methods of communication, like face-to-face interaction or on-the-phone communication, for online interactions. This reliance on social media to facilitate communication is what is limiting users from true and meaningful interactions with their loved ones. Overall, all relationships perform maintenance behaviors in order to maintain and sustain the quality of the relationship. For college students, they maintain their relationships with loved ones back home by frequently checking and updating their Facebook. However, this type of behavior is hurting the quality of the relationship because social media “... use may consume a substantial amount of time… “ that could be spent on real and more meaningful interactions (Ahn and Shin 2453). Sponcil and Gitimu add that while students did interact with family and friends by posting information on their social networking sites, they spent most of their just skimming through posts and updates on their timelines without interacting at all (pp 4-5). This “...activity...only constitutes one-sided communication (Sponcil and Gitimu 4-5)." There is no quality in a relationship when there is only one-sided communication. Thus, these shifts in maintenance behaviors therefore hinder, rather than improve the quality of the relationship. |