Creating & Maintaining Relationships Online
As the internet and technology have continued to evolve over the past decade, so have the ways that people can connect and maintain relationships. This has only further been heightened due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying social restrictions. While we can see through data the increase in internet use overall (E.g. streaming service use, social media), I want to focus on the increase in video-chat platforms. As a college student, I can attest to the increase and gain of new users for video-chat platforms such as Zoom and GoogleMeets. According to iOS App Store rankings on March 16–18 2020, we can see app popularity for Zoom and Google Classroom spiked significantly, with Zoom having an exponential growth from 2 million to over 6 million and Google Classroom jumping from 2 million to about 5 million (Koeze & Popper, 2020). The same drastic growth has been observed in video chat platforms that are more “social-based” (as opposed to work or academic associated platforms like Zoom). For example, daily app traffic on HouseParty in January 2020 compared to March 2020 increased by 79.4% (Koeze & Popper, 2020). These numbers are likely to be significantly higher if examined today, a year after the initial start of the pandemic and lockdown measures in America.
Based on this data and our own experiences over the past year in a pandemic and internet-based world, we can see that the internet has played a large role in serving our needs, from social to academic to financial (work) needs. However, we can see pros and cons on how this new-found increased exposure can influence our ability to create and maintain social relationships. As seen in the article linked above, many individuals have been able to find new and fun ways to still connect while socially distant, such as many friends or coworkers hosting “virtual happy hours”. People are still able to romantically date through apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble. However, the internet is not an ideal or always good way to maintain relationships. Studies have suggested “that time spent on social media may be associated with increased anxiety, depression, and other mental health ailments”; this was further confirmed by a study investigating early Covid-19 media exposure in a participant pool of 917 Chinese residents (Garfin, 2020, p.556). The overall verdict is that while technology is a mainly positive temporary fix for social relationships, it will never be a perfect substitute for face-to-face social interactions.
