ABSTRACT

Family is the primary and fundamental unit of society. It is the basic building block of the society which socializes its members into a particular mode of thought and behavior. Family is a basic social institution and also is the basic primary group which is marked by intimate, direct and close interpersonal relationships. It is the basic source of security, love, belongingness and identity. However, change is the law of nature. Any social institution is susceptible to change under the impetus of various forces of change like modernization, industrialization, urbanization, globalization etc. Thus, as with other social institutions, the social institution of family has been impacted by various forces of change. The concern of this paper is with social networking technology as a source of change. The paper concerns itself with the impact of Social networking technology on the interpersonal relationships in the family. With the advent of new social networking technologies, people are becoming more individualistic and family members are spending less time together. Social networking sites are becoming a part and parcel of people’s daily routines, displacing the warm, primary and direct interactions between the family members with the ones that are weak and secondary in nature. Therefore this study is set out to explore how the social networking sites within home are leading to an increasing privatization of members. Data was collected from the study area with the help of personal interviews from a sample of 15 households (15 male heads and 15 female heads of the selected families, one male and one female from each household). The findings reveal that SNSs are negatively impacting relationships within the household leading to individualistic pattern and social isolation among the individuals.