With lack of communication being so core to many conflicts, including roommate conflicts, the increased presence of social media in university students’ lives is not helping at all.
Perhaps being so used to communicating our thoughts and feelings virtually has caused the deterioration of many students’ ability to communicate face-to-face.
Social media has made conflict resolution much more difficult, especially when conflicts can become more magnified by passive aggression expressed through the different channels of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter.
When talking things over in person takes a backseat to sub-Tweeting your roommate drama online, students’ conflict resolution skills suffer as a result. Disagreements over how clean your shared living space needs to be, or over how loud your music should be played can become friendship-ending events—but they shouldn’t be.
While technology has the ability to do so much, when it comes to resolving conflicts, putting down the screen and addressing these issues in person is the best call.
