Social Media "Friends"

In a time where people can get lost in the vast world of online communities, people are able to have millions of "friends" without even knowing all of them. Silver critiques the modern technology that provides us with social media by saying that it ruins our personal relationships with people and creates false friendships. I think that Silver is correct depending on the person that we focus on. For someone who uses social media more often than interacting with other people, it can absolutely be a viable source for people to create and grow relationships. For example, if you spend most of your time at the gym playing basketball and very little time out on the soccer field then you are going to build better relationships with people at the gym playing basketball, simply because that is where you spend most of your time. This is the same with social media; if you spend most of your time interacting with people online then that is where you are going to build more and better relationships with other people. However, for people who spend very little time online, they will not be able to maintain meaningful relationships with everyone they know online. These people require face-to-face interactions with people in order to sustain these relationships. I think that if a person were to spend a majority of their time on Facebook and updated their profile very often and used it to communicate with people then it would be a good source to build relationships. However, I think that Facebook can also have the opposite effect on people that spend very little time on it and do not check in on their "friends" often.