Social Media and Human Relationships

Charts and data on social media's progress, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+.

New research shows that buzz plays a greater role than previously thought in getting consumers to buy and that the pool of the most effective influencers is largely untapped.

This video made the rounds yesterday, tugging at heartstrings and giving us all in the Era Of Communication a bit of a kick in the buttocks. It shows a woman who forgot her phone. The premise is hokey at best, but it still tells us something about ourselves these past few years. Our world is endlessly mediated through lenses and screens. They used to tell us we’d get cancer if we sat too…

With more than 1 billion users worldwide and an unstated mission to make more money, Facebook has become a social network that's often too complicated, too risky, and, above all, too overrun by parents to give teens the type of digital freedom or release they crave.

For tweens and teens, Instagram -- and, more recently, SnapChat, an app for sending photos and videos that appear and then disappear -- is the opposite of Facebook: simple, seemingly secret, and fun. Around schools, kids treat these apps like pot, enjoyed in low-lit corners, and all for the undeniable pleasure and temporary fulfillment of feeling cool. Facebook, meanwhile, with its Harvard dorm room roots, now finds itself scrambling to keep up with the tastes of the youngest trendsetters -- even as it has its hooks in millions of them since it now owns Instagram.

Facebook is losing its grip on kids, according to a recent article by CNET's Jennifer Van Grove, in which she cites complicated features and too much parental control.

Growing up, say in middle school or later, it wasn’t “cool” to be considered a “loner” among peers. The social implications weren’t fun to suffer. But, now, as a product, I believe that a major part of Twitter’s success, stickiness, and permanence is the fact that it provides a lightweight social outlet for folks to connect and converse with others who, at that exact moment in time, regardless of geography, social status, money, or other trappings, could be connected around interests and share information with each other.

I don’t know why I’m writing this now. So much has been written about Twitter, so I’m sure this has been covered, too — though I have yet to read anything about it. And, I’ll at least offer something for those in the Valley struggling in building their business or company, or trying really hard in their job, or trying to get noticed — Twitter creates the rare opportunity for a place to exist online where one can find others who are in the same predicament. From a product level, this is powerful, because it engenders loyalty among users (like me) who benefit from meeting new people through the service.

Relationships are collapsing. It is the crisis that everyone feels but that has gone unnamed. We see the pieces: families disintegrating; communities in chaos; businesses losing the trust of customers and employees; political and religious discourse that sows dysfunction and divide. Yet until now, the dots have not been connected that reveal the larger narrative. Cumulatively, our broken relationships have a death grip on economic, political, and social advancements that capitalism, democracy, and social initiatives have been unable to break. This crisis feeds an emerging caste system: Individuals and organizations that possess superior relationships thrive, while those with deteriorating relationships are destined to decline. In This Land of Strangers, Robert Hall lays the crisis bare, and you will be shocked at the magnitude of destruction he reveals.

Hall's best-selling business book, The Streetcorner Strategy for Winning Local Markets, helped spawn the customer relationship management movement. Now, with deep passion and insight borne from three decades of study, he widens the lens to look at the breadth of our relational decline and the societal trends that got us here. Focusing on four key domains - home, work, politics, and faith - he presents wide-ranging research that explores the unraveling of our life-giving relationships and the attendant costs. He debunks the assumption that we can build better lives and a stronger society on crumbling relationships.

With engaging narrative style and stories, Hall looks at modern life through the prism of relationships. He challenges readers to embrace three aims that will reverse the forces that gave birth to today's land of strangers to usher in a new era - the Age of Relationship.

Many organizations have started using social media tools internally to interact with their employees. However, the majority of companies have either stayed away from using these tools or failed to see satisfactory results. In fact, in our survey of 1060 global executives, only 30% said that they work for companies that benefited from the internal use of social media.

Why do so many companies either avoid using social media or fail to make it work? In an article with Quy Huy which just came out in the MIT Sloan Management Review we find that to be successful, internal social media initiatives must focus first on the development of EMOTIONAL CAPITAL that represents the quality of the emotional connection between a company and its employees. Executives who use social media to build emotional capital in the communities of their employees reap real benefits, in terms of improved information flows, collaboration, lower turnover and higher employee motivation.

Either we’re getting old and grouchy or Facebook is becoming a lot less tolerable these days. Here are the 20 most annoying behaviors in your News Feed.

My past relationships predate social media of the Friendster and later type. So being friended or circled or followed by an ex on social media can’t be a case of ‘Oops, forgot to unfriend/uncircle/unfollow’. But these connections do pique my interest, not because there’s anything much to say, but because there might be interesting news & quirky thoughts to follow. After all, if I can be curious about gossip regarding celebrities from shows I don’t even watch, this is bound to be more interesting.

The 3A's of online human behavior

The 3 A's represent 3 key ways the internet has changed human behavior.

- Access: The internet has given everyone access to more information, good, bad and everything in between, than human society has ever had before; and it keeps growing rapidly each year.
- Acceptance: Whoever you are and whatever you do there are more people out there that share that with you. This has given rise to one of the key benefits of social media, acceptance by others. It is a powerful ingredient in human relationships.
- Anonymity: Probably the most potent and empowering characteristic available to people is the ability to be anonymous. This empowers and changes the way we behave online because it frees us of an important restraint — Accountability. And when we are free of accountability human beings are capable of many wonderful and horrible things.

We worry that IM, texting, Facebook are spoiling human intimacy, but Stefana Broadbent's research shows how communication tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules.

Stefana Broadbent watches us while we talk (and IM, and text). She is one of a new class of ethnographers who study the way our social habits and relationships function and mutate in the digital age.

TED Talks As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication -- and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.

Sherry Turkle talks about why we expect more from technology and less from each other.

Sherry Turkle is a professor, author, consultant, researcher, and licensed clinical psychologist who has spent the last 30 years researching the psychology of people's relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her many books include a trilogy on digital technology and human relationships: "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit," "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet," and most recently, "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other." Her investigations show that technology doesn't just catalyze changes in what we do -- it affects how we think.

Professor Turkle writes on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She has been named "woman of the year" by Ms. Magazine and among the "forty under forty" who are changing the nation by Esquire Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.

Research by many people (most importantly Keith Hampton) show again and again that Internet/Facebook users are less isolated than people who don’t use social media. Yes, there are complicated interaction effects but the simplest empirical answer to the simple form of the question is … no. By most standards of reasonable evidence, the answer is pretty much out there (even if ignored by most articles on the topic).

Why, then, is this question repeatedly invoked? I have a few thoughts on this. Here they are in a hastily written form (on my way to the airport!)

by Zeynep Tufekci

Social media - from Facebook to Twitter - have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic) - and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

We use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right: the Goldilocks effect.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

It's just one factor in modern life that can increase connection in a world divided by the vagaries of capitalism, the disengagement of television, and the isolation of suburban sprawl.

That might not have been apparent to those who picked up their Sunday New York Times to find Sherry Turkle's latest essay arguing that social media are driving us apart. If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media's rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging attempt by people everywhere to connect with *each other* in the face of all the obstacles that modernity imposes on our lives: suburbanization that isolates us from each other, long working-hours and commutes that are required to make ends meet, the global migration that scatters families across the globe, the military-industrial-consumption machine that drives so many key decisions, and, last but not least, the television -- the ultimate alienation machine -- which remains the dominant form of media. (For most people, the choice is not leisurely walks on Cape Cod versus social media. It's television versus social media).

As a social media researcher and a user, every time I read one of these "let's panic" articles about social media (and there are many), I want to shout: Look at TV! Look at commutes! Look at suburbs! Look at long work hours! That is, essentially, my response to Stephen Marche's "Facebook Is Making Us Lonely," which ran in The Atlantic magazine.

Evidence from the US General Social Surveys (GSS) suggests that during the past 20 years, people have become increasingly socially isolated and their core discussion networks have become smaller and less diverse. One explanation offered for this trend is the use of mobile phones and the Internet. This study reports on the findings of a 2008 survey that replicates and expands on the GSS network methodology to explore the relationship between the use of new technologies and the size and diversity of core networks. The findings conflict with the results of the 2004 GSS, i.e. we find that social isolation has not increased since 1985. However, the current study supports the conclusions that the size of core networks has declined and the number of nonkin in core networks has diminished. Mobile phone and Internet use, especially specific uses of social media, were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity. In discussing these trends, we speculate that specific social media provide for a ‘pervasive awareness’ within personal networks that has increased the specialization of close ties. We argue that this same pervasive awareness provides for heightened surveillance of network members, the result of which is a higher level of perceived diversity within networks based on metrics that include political affiliation.