Describe The Role of Social Media in Connecting Families

The Role of Social Media in Connecting Families
Does It Really Make Families Closer or Not?
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The Role of Social Media in Connecting Families:
Does It Really Make Families Closer or Not?
Centuries ago, people believed that the earth is flat until one man named Pythagoras (around 6th Century BC) gave an idea that the Earth is Spherical. The spherical shape was further proven with evidence on empirical grounds by Aristotle by around 330 BC (“Flat Earth”, n. d.). This allowed people to travel around the world for it negates the idea that when the world is flat you cannot travel too far as you might fall off it edges thus, connected people together and the rest is history for we all know how transportation have evolved all those years that have passed, but humans are never satisfied. The first computer was invented by Charles Babbage between 1833 and 1877 (Harris, 2011). The first workable prototype of internet on the other hand was invented in the late 1960s and was called ARPANET or the Advance Research Projects Agency Networks. This eventually evolved with the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Burners-Lee, a computer scientist, in 1990 (Andrews, 2013). These things led to a new form of connecting people in a virtual world and is now global trend
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or Youtube, who doesn’t have one nowadays? These are just a few of the social media sites that most people have. Social media is defined as a set of internet sites that allows people to interact from all over the world. This can be through audio, messaging, photos and videos (Whiteman, 2015). On a typical day, Kate an average teenager would have visited this sites several times a day. According to Asano (2017), Teens nowadays are able to spend up to nine hours a day on social media platforms. 30% of this time spent online is being allotted to social media interaction.” He further stated that nearly 2 hours a day is spent by an average person on Social media. He also gave a breakdown of the time spent by an average person on social media platforms per day. The breakdown is as follows: 40 minutes for Youtube, 35 minutes for Facebook, 25 minutes for Instagram, 15 minutes for Snapchat and 1 minute for Twitter for a total of 116 minutes per day. With these amount of time spent to just 5 social media platforms not considering the more than 56 other websites stated by Spencer (2017), do you think this will really make families closer together?
To discuss this, we will need to define the context of what a family is and the positive and negative effects of Social Media in family relationships.
A family, in the context of Human society, is a   group of people related to either by recognized birth (consanguinity), by marriage or other relationship (affinity), co-residence or some combination of these (“Family” n. d.). There are several types of family structures that exist today. Six of these are the Nuclear Family, Extended Family, Single Parent Family, Grand Parent Family, Childless Family, and Step Family. The Nuclear Family which consist of two parents and children is considered as a traditional type of family. The Single Parent Family on the other hand only have one parent raising one or more children on his own. Another type of Family is The Extended Family which has two or more adults who are related, either by blood or marriage and lives on the same home. This family also includes many relatives that are residing in the same house and working towards common goals usually by raising the children and keeping up with the household duties. Extended families can include grandparents, aunts or uncles and cousins living together. Families who either cannot or do not want children is called a Childless Family. In this family, only the couple, husband and wife, live and work together. Marriages sometimes ends in Divorce. Many of these Divorcees choose to marry again. The family they will create is called a step family where two separate families merge into one unit. Lastly, in cases where parents are not able to raise their own child, their grandparents are the ones who raise them and this structure is called the Grandparent Family, (Blessing, n.d). All these family structures are mostly defined as living together in one house.
There is another type of Family structure that are widely present nowadays and that is the Transnational Families. Transnational families are basically families who live far from each other but still create and retain ‘familyhood’ or the sense of unity and collective welfare, even across national borders (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002). These include transnational couples that are migrant spouse/partner and non-migrant spouse/partner), non-migrant children who stays at home while their migrant parents live and work in another country, and migrants and their non-migrant siblings and elderly parents, (Fesenmeyer, n.d.). I believe this type of family greatly benefits in using social media for communication therefore strengthening their relationships. Unlike in the past where letters or cassette tapes tak...