for our last video we're going to be talking about dialectics and technology and interpersonal relationships so in this video we're going to talk about relational dialectics how to manage those dialectics and then technology and virtual miscommunication relational dialectics so it's important not to confuse this with dialects although I guess you could kind of kind of maybe connect that in some way but dialectics are different than dialects uh dialysis to do with language but dialectics has to do with with tensions between conflicting forces and then relational dialectics are the competing psychological tensions that exist in any relationship so no matter how good of a relationship whatever you're going to have these tensions and they can be in in again like in romantic or in platonic relationships so the three main categories I mean there's there's more probably but the three main ones that the book discusses is autonomy and connection openness and close encloseness novelty and predictability so autonomy and connection um means that you know autonomy is basically saying your desire to keep things independent so wanting to be independent of the person that you're with we all have a desire to be you know to be independent in a way but but some people truly truly truly love and desire connection meaning that they desire to be very linked to the person that they're with and whether it's a friend or a romantic partner but they desire to link their actions and decisions together with a person that they're with and so this attention arises when our when Partners when are both Partners uh romantic or platonic differ about what they currently desire so maybe you are been friends with someone for a long time and you'll spend a lot of time together and you just feel like you haven't been spending as much time with some of your other friends so you really want to do that but maybe your other friend gets kind of hurt because you're like wait what did I do wrong why don't you want to hang out with me and that's really has nothing to do without wanting to hang out with them you just still want to have your own um you know your own dependency as well in independency I guess I should say like you should have your own autonomy as well you want to have like other friends so that would be that one then you have openness and closeness and openness is the desire to share intimate ideas and feelings and closeness is desire to Maine to keep things private or to maintain some privacy and this often impacts one's comfortability with self-disclosure another influence might include the relationship stage meaning that some people might be willing right at their get-go like the you know acquaintances to be like hell this is what's going on in my life whereas you might be like oh I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily share that so I mean you might depending on the relationship stage that you're in relationship stage that you're in you may or may not be open or want to be and maybe the other person that's your friend that you're developing a friendship with they they want you to or a romantic partner maybe y'all are dating and they want you to be more open and more communicative but you're you're just not really there yet so you could have they can go both ways right so that's openness closeness and then you have novelty and predictability so this has to do with the desire for originality freshness and uniqueness um and our own or our partners behavior in a relationship so like this is like if you're in like romantic relationships the beginning everyone's like much about kind of the honeymoon stage that's the novelty stage right and then you have predictability and this is the desire for consistency reliability and dependability so some people really thrive on that they like like my husband is the predictability person like he loves having said like just consistent partner like the people in his life have been his people in his life like I'm talking about his friends family like all this it's like the same people since third grade he's still best friends with like 10 dudes from elementary school it's really cool but I mean it's like they're all like that they're all just really really close and that's important to them um whereas I'm kind of in the middle I like I I get this tension because I like predictability because I do like that being able to depend on somebody and I want to be that person like for my my friends and my um relation and my romantic Partners I want to be that oh I guess I'm already know so my relationship partner but uh but with my I also like growing up I love transferring schools I know it sounds weird but I would like transfers I transfer schools after fourth grade in fifth grade not really because I meant to but because just we had to move up for sixth grade but then I transferred again in seventh grade and then I transferred my senior year none of those it was because anything bad happened I had lots of friends at all of them I I honestly think I just really love making new friends I'm just weird like that I guess but I love that novelty part um but I'm kind of in the middle like I definitely like the predictability like just I like that Comfort aspect but every now and then I'll you know I like having some uniqueness and some freshness in my life as well so all relationships go through this but sometimes it's a struggling and cause tension when two relationship partners are not on the same page and they don't know how to get on the same page with those things so how do we manage dialectical tensions in relationships you know in most cases it's going to be a good thing to openly discuss these tensions as long as you can do it in a respectful and kind way obviously but it's going to be good to discuss it because not doing so is going to kind of damage or hinder a relationship's ability to move forward also it can kind of help you come up with agreements and work through things in a healthy way so you want to make sure if possible to discuss these tensions so that people know what's going on and make that part of norms of you or communication Norms of that relationship so there are different ways that you can manage these dialectical tensions when they arise and the first one is temporal selection so in this strategy it's basically just you know temporarily taking choosing one person's needs over another and then maybe kind of seesawing that like okay we do this for you and then I did it for me and now it is for you and let me do something so this is more of just a um you know for it for a ton that shouldn't always be like this I think that you should eventually learn how to collaborate we're going to talk about that later but um but for a time it might be just like maybe your romantic partner is feeling very hurt or their feelings or hurt several ways or they're just feeling like you don't um you know you don't want to spend a lot of time with them because maybe you're kind of in like this mode of autonomy or something so you're like you know what I want them to know it's not them I just you know I needed some air or some space so um you know I'm gonna you know go and hang out with them some make sure they know that they are cared for and then ask you know for me maybe I could have a weekend with my friends or something so you might go that's like temporal selection that means just going back and forth and then topical segmentation this is a strategy of choosing certain topics to satisfy one's desire and other topics to satisfy the opposite desire so you may practice like this might be like um you may practice openness with a friend and you might talk about certain you know that safe topics topics that are comfortable to talk about and then just avoid other stuff you don't really want to so that maybe has your friend really desires uh close deep conversations so you know that so you talk about things that you know that y'all get along with and you will you would definitely engage in that but maybe you steer clear of some other topics because you don't know that you'll agree or that that would upset them so that might be topical segmentation then there's neutralization this strategy is more of like compromising meaning that um you know both people get some of what they desire and so does the other person um the only issue is you know neither person gets fully what they desire sometimes but sometimes it's just the best option so an example might be keeping a moderate level of novelty and spontaneity in the relationship so maybe someone likes to stay home there you know you might have a friend that's a homebody and they just really want to stay home but you really loved going to do something new so maybe I'll decide to like my friend and I are deciding to do a um set like a cooking class online at her house so she likes to stay in so I'm gonna go across we're going to get we're actually gonna buy a master class and then do a cooking class every night that we hang out together or just do that and so we kind of are in the middle right so we're I get the novelty aspect that I like but she also gets her predictability that she desires so that's neutralization and then reframing so this is obviously if if the situation allows for it because not all situations will but reframing is more of like the collaboration type Outlook and collaborations the best way if possible to handle things because it means that you're looking at things from A New Perspective and you're coming up with an idea that satisfies both people fully and so I can understand maybe not it's not always going to be able to do that but sometimes you can and so the strategy of changing your perception about posing desire so they no longer seem quite so contradictory I think this is really important especially so like my husband I am very much the openness type person and he can be more of a closed closeness type person and so talking to him and helping him reframe how he looks at communication because some of it's because he just never really got to he just never really communicated a lot his family didn't always just talk about everything together when he was younger so he's not used to it so reframing it to be like oh Helen's not wanting to have these really like figure stuff out conversations just to like I don't know just to talk and she really genuinely desires and and for me I had to understand like oh this really doesn't fill his cup like mine so we came up with new ways for us both to fully get feel fulfilled in that aspect so it takes time and development but this ultimately is what's going to make both parties happiest if possible finally let's look at technology and how that influences our interpersonal relationships so I remember going to college and Facebook was brand new I mean I guess it came out a couple of years before I did but it was still you had to be a college student in order to have an account and I remember how much that changed my ability to be able to keep up with friends from high school because I went to a I went to Northwest Arkansas I went to college and I didn't get to see a whole lot of my friends that I got used to but I was able to keep up with them and I think back to like my mom always said wow it's so great that you get to have this because I didn't have this and I lost touch with a lot of friends once we went to college so you know when we think about technology there's so many good parts there's some things that we need to be aware of but there's some really great aspects you see here I said that you know technology is changing how we build and maintain relationships you can you can start friendships or romantic relationships online or through an app you can do that you can also maintain those relationships kind of like I talked about with Facebook when I I used to go back and just like I wonder what so-and-so is doing go look look them up or something along those lines so it just helps you be able to keep in touch but it also means that you need to be thinking about you know how much you're putting out there if these people are real there's so many things that go along with it too but um there's some strategies that have to do with building relationships or maintaining relationships online so the first of these is hyper personal communication so this is our online self-presentation this is like us putting our breasts our best foot forward right so this is us being able to um I don't know just you you want to put what you put on your social media profile what you would put what you might post all those things have to do with your hyper personal communication like for me I really don't post all that much on on a lot of my forums except for um you know for on certain forms it's for like my Ministry stuff that I do on the side but for other things it's more it has to do with just hey I want my friends to know what's happening with John Ryan and that's really it so it again but it's what do you want to put out there why do you want to put that out there what's the goal of the communication and there's media multiplexity our use of media forums to maintain relationships closer relationships often use more forums so I mean naturally you may talk to some people on social media websites but you may not text them or have their number I have several friends like that or maybe I do from a long time ago but I don't ever talk to them that way but then we may have like people that I'm closest to I probably called them text them I have their emails for whatever reason I I interact with them on social media so you see there's there's more the closer you are to somebody the more you know multi like more media that you most likely use and then polymedia so the influence navigate navigation among various Technologies has on relationship formation and development so this has to do with why would you use certain apps or not certain apps or why would you use email versus texting like maybe you don't feel comfortable texting because um you know normal like maybe in normal formats like you wouldn't text your professor I know that I'm okay with that but like you wouldn't protect your professor because that's not very professional so you would email them instead that would be an idea of poly media so you have to think about what is the most appropriate way also what how does this relate how do I use this relation or how do I use this app for the development or the maintenance of this relationship and then um just as we distance ourselves physically we distance ourselves virtually by just engaging with text or other virtual forms of communication like if you think about if you've ever seen a relationship kind of coming to an end that would be something you would think about right like you kind of stop talk texting as much maybe you don't call them as much especially if it's like a dating party maybe that starts going then you stop interacting with them as much on social media there's so many ways that we do that we literally distance ourselves sometimes uh virtually just like we would if we were seeing them face to face so here's some guidelines that we want to pay attention to so we want to speak um the right language so whatever is right for that type of the media that you're using so I want to make sure that you're following those appropriate guidelines those norms and then amplifying the signal so sometimes you have to be a little bit more uh like say if you're texting you might want to use emojis or things like that to let people know like okay this is my thing but of course many of you probably know that but that's what amplifying the signal means so make sure that they know what you mean try as much as you can to show the non-verbal side of things and then respond promptly I'm not so great with this sometimes but um being prompt especially with the people you truly care about I think that is something that I haven't even realized how much time um really does influence how people feel like you care about them so then we have a void sloppy emailing that's something I would definitely avoid whenever you're in any type of like if you're emailing your professor or instructor definitely you should be thinking okay how I should be response I should be doing this very respectfully or formally so that's something that's important to think about should I have for more informal should I be here and then encourage everyone to expect problems meaning that you know like just allowing people to realize that you may not be on this particular form like for me A lot of times I tell my students ahead of the time hey if you message me through Blackboard or if you like if you email me on the weekends I probably won't see that as much that's why that's why I give you my personal number because I'm like hey if you go about this way probably not going to get a hold of me but you can if you use this route so always being able to be up front with that but technology has definitely changed how we put ourselves out there and we always want to be aware of how we can sometimes create virtual miscommunication just by not following these guidelines so make sure that you follow these guidelines so that you make sure to communicate correctly here are this video's exam prep questions go ahead and pause the video write your answers possibly think of your why for each answer and then press play when you're ready to continue now for your reflection question pause the video and answer and then press play to end the video