What Are Cyber-Relationships?

What are cyber-relationships? They are not only romantic relationships, but normal relationships between friends and family as well. Cyber-relationship addiction occurs when an individual focuses more on their virtual life in social networking sites, texting and chat rooms to the extent that their real-life relationships with family and friends are compromised for online ones.

The main reason is that all of us use mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and etc, to cultivate our friendships and relationships with others (Bargh and Mckenna, 575). We must ask ourselves, “Have we been too caught up with relationships online that we fail to nurture our real-life, face-to-face relationships?” In our world today, it is not uncommon to find a couple or family sitting in a restaurant, focused on their own mobile devices rather than the person in front of them. Although it is true that multifunctional devices such as mobile phones have proven to be indispensable to a certain degree, they may have impacted its users negatively. What is the extent of cyber-relationship addiction today? What are the demographics that are usually affected by this addiction? What factors influence why people are more focused on cyber relationships than real life ones? With the help of relevant academic sources, these questions will be answered in this literature review.

Cyber relationship addiction has firstly gone to such an extent that people have become less empathetic towards others because of their bizarre usage of their mobile devices for hundreds of hours. In Cross’ book, he shares that In May 2010, a study reported from the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan showed the feelings of empathy have remarkably declined among college stude...

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...some cyber-relationships formed online, were actually transported and inducted into their real lives, into traditional face-to-face social interaction (580). Other research has shown that there are a few factors that influence cyber-relationship addiction, mainly a person’s e-personality, the occurrence of cyber bullying caused by the anonymity of the Internet, as well as the enhanced power of communication. Caution must be advised that Aboujaoude and Lambert lack more detailed findings that would otherwise make their sources more reliable. Chatfield and Cross’ reports are backed up by their surveys, but may be subjected to instrument decay because they did not state the methods they used to get the results. Furthermore, some of their research were done in specific settings, and should instead be done in a natural one in order to obtain a wider variety of results.