Electronic Media and Our Relationships

As electronic media has progressed so have human relationships. Relationships with our environment, ourselves, and each other have changed more rapidly than they have ever previously had the ability to and the introduction of new medias, new relationships and formed and older, outdated ones are phased out. In Baym's reading Personal Connections in the Digital Age it's mentioned how “We can use non verbally limited media such as text messages or emails to shelter us from anxiety-inducing encounters such as flirting or ending relationships" (4). This example of how people use new forms of communication to get out of situations is one that most people can say they've used and it really shows just how impact these new forms of communication and media are on our relationships with others. In previous times  if someone wanted to end a relationship they would have to go face the person and tell them how they really feel but with the new technologies it makes it so ending a big part of your life isn't as much an ordeal as it was previously. These new technologies allow for a disconnect between what is happening in real life because the phone causes a break in immediate backlash that would have previously been immediately evident to those who are involved in the situation. In a previous time without electronic mediums for communication people's actions would have had to have immediate negative consequences but because it's not so easy to hide behind phones for people there is a break in the chain between cause and effect -- people feel much more comfortable saying things they would have previously been to afraid to say. While this has some positive effects such as people finally speaking out on the internet for causes that may have previously remained silenced it also means that in online forms such as video games people know their actions will have next to negative effect so they completely remove their filter. This is due to the online media allowing them nearly complete freedom to say what they believe and the affect of this is that things get said by people that they would never say in real life.

These needs for avoiding awkward situations have been the way social relationships have been shaping electronic media but it also goes the other way -- just as much as relationships shapes media, the electronic media has the effect of shaping relationships as well. As mentioned in a previous post, since the creation of electronic forms of communication there have been new ways of communicating with people that people may have never otherwise had the chance to communicate with. When communicating online instead of face to face people often have more confidence to say what they think this means that they oftentimes allows their personality to come out more confidently and what they speak about to be less censored. There are two sides to this idea, one positive and one negative. The positive side of relationship's effects on media is that because of people's need to communicate more effectively with those around them there have been many great services created based around making communication with other more effective and fast. This is seen in services like Facebook and their ability to offer services during natural disasters to ensure your loved ones that you are safe during a natural disaster by posting to a Facebook group saying that you are safe. Services like this take the load off of phone-lines during times of emergency by making a person's safety publicly available so that viable resources like cellular tower data loads can be spared for those who need them most. The negative side is that with the feeling of freedom people are more empowered to speak about ideas that they otherwise wouldn't speak about in public -- this idea is shown in in Lisa Nakamura's paper Gender and Race Online with the mention of how online "Individual examples of person-to-person prejudice and harassment are ubiquitous within networked video games" (84). Online people's need to have relationships with those in their favorite games have created a way of communication that has next to no moderation at all. Though the rules outlines in most games say that racism and sexism are not allowed it's evident to any online gamer that both run rampant through almost any online game.