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Technology and Dating
Technology and Dating
Technology and Dating
Students at BYU-Idaho look down upon the use of technology in dating and have negative
experiences with it. However, the use of technology has become viewed as common among some
students, leading to skewed expectations of technologys role in dating from student to student.
These results were found by evaluating student responses as being positive, negative or neutral
for the first question. The second questions was categories by topic, since all responses were designed
to be negative. The categories are loss of communication, stalker/abuse, miscommunication or
misrepresentation, preferred contact to be face to face and a neutral response.
30%
20%
10%
0%
Positive
The majority of
students critiqued
social media
interactions as being
inferior to face to
face interactions.
Many of the
experiences sorted
into the other
categories would
have potentially been
avoided if the
interaction had taken
place face to face. For
the sake of this study,
the obvious problem
is being examined most.
Negative
Neutral
Some of the worst experiences were due to a loss of communication. They had found someone
that they were truly interested in, but errors and unexplained loss of communication left some
wondering what would have happened. The technology itself was to blame in these cases. About 16% of
the cases involved someone becoming overly attached after only a short time or using social media to
hurt others relationships. 26% said that either the other person turned out to be different than what
their social media interaction suggested or that some things that they have said have been taken in a
way other than how they meant it. The most common response was that they preferred face to face
interaction more than any digital permutation. About a quarter of the response simply said that they
had not had any negative experiences or even sometimes any experiences at all to contribute to the list.
The survey clearly shows that most BYU-Idaho students prefer face to face interaction over
social media or texting when it comes to dating. However, since most have had a negative experience
with these digital means of communication, most are involved in such communication despite their
disdain of it.