SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Tech and social media are making us feel lonelier than ever:
You've had a social day. Two hundred Facebook friends posted birthday messages, your video of Mr. Meow shredding the toilet paper stash got dozens of retweets, and all the compliments on your latest Instagram selfie have you strutting with an extra swagger. Still, you can't help but notice an ache that can only be described as loneliness.
That we feel this way even when hyperconnected might seem like a contradiction. But the facts are clear: Constant virtual connections can often amplify the feeling of loneliness.
"Internet-related technologies are great at giving us the perception of connectedness," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist who's written about the intersection of psychology and tech. The truth, he says, is the time and energy spent on social media's countless connections may be happening at the expense of more rooted, genuinely supportive and truly close relationships.
If virtual socializing cannot substitute for the real thing, will social media prove out to be nothing more than a fad of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Friday June 19 2020, @01:02PM (9 children)
I can't even recall how many papers I have seen, and glanced at, in recent years that mentions this or some version of it. That social media just isn't social and that it strengthens the effects of loneliness in people, simply due to the fact that all the other people seem to have super fun luxury filled lives -- cause that is all the things people generally post about. So you get a very skewed selection of other peoples lives, all the mundane and boring bits are cut out. As it turns out it's better to have a couple of actual REAL friends (possibly even imaginary friends) then to have all your hundreds of twitter- and facebook-friends that quite frankly amount to nothing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @01:39PM
I posted this above, but I think it's more than that. I was using text-only BBS and IRC discussions in the 1990s. There were no views, no likes, no shares, and no hosting company trying to trick me into visiting the site as often as possible to boost ad revenue. It was just a discussion of games, movies, politics, religion, and so forth. There was nowhere near the level of trolling that you see now, I had thousands of conversations with hundreds of people. And it was still totally addictive and totally alienating.
I think the human brain is just wired to need non-verbal communication for interaction to be emotionally fulfilling, and no matter how many new emojis get added to the Unicode standard it's still no substitute. Hanging out with a person or doing a video call for an hour will do better for loneliness and isolation than six hours of good text/post/tweet discussion.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @02:00PM (1 child)
My hypothesis is that the authors of these papers are themselves depressed and at least believe that they 'had it better' in their past before all this came around.
Is there an accepted system in social/psychological academia for rating author bias? Perhaps used for meta-analysis, it could be tuned to zero-sum effect across all published psychological research so that when you include author bias in a meta-analysis, you find that the sum of all psychological research says nothing. One would hope that the true level of author bias is less than that zero-sum level, but what if it is actually greater?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @02:11PM
None that comes to mind, but I'm not really in the qualitative field but spend almost all of my time on quantitative projects. There are various metrics that are quite common but they are usually there to measure productivity as in how many papers you put out and how many times they are referred or referenced to, oddly enough they rarely make a distinction between if it's you that are referencing yourself and your previous work or if it's other people so after a while you start to notice these trends of people pushing out similar papers year after year with an ever increasing reference list but it's mostly made up of your own previous works so you are now bolstering your metrics by pushing out more papers and another paper is now mentioning your previous work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @02:04PM (5 children)
Maybe you're doing it wrong?
When we were expecting our first, my wife found several good facebook friends also expecting their first children - a lot in commmon and they still keep in touch 18 years later.
Obviously, the (top 0.1%) influencer crowds derive better than average income from their social media activity - as realistic a goal for most of us as playing pro basketball, but nonetheless real, and by its very nature: highly visible.
Somewhere in-between those two extremes, it's easy to get lost - but I've seen plenty of "real life" relationships die of neglect/under-investment.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday June 19 2020, @02:17PM (4 children)
Me personally is probably doing it very wrong since I don't even have any facebook/twitter etc accounts. I think this is as close to social media as I come. It's clearly working out for some people, that isn't the issue. But there is the backside and that is that it seems to create unrealistic images towards people that "follow" or get all/most of their interactions from just watching what other people do. As the mundane aspects of life just goes missing, if you follow a lot of people it seems to be all happy times all the time and that just isn't the case for most of us.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday June 19 2020, @05:07PM (1 child)
How is that possible? Just yesterday you were claiming they were unavoidable monopolies!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday June 19 2020, @05:23PM
I have no recollection of ever having said those words. That must have been your interpretation of it. That they are big and control a lot of things and have a monopoly type place on the internet infrastructure doesn't mean I, or all of us, have to have an account with them. Just that a large chunk of people do and it's a scary amount of power that is consolidated into the hands of a few players.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @05:52PM
I'm with you there, the less invested the higher the ROI ratio. Better things to do with my time/life.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @05:57PM
I think this reaches back through history: unrealistic models depicted on television and in print, unrealistic stories read over the radio / around campfires, that hot ho that would ride through town tempting all the men and then riding out before anyone realized she was dying of syphilis, etc.
Any asymmetric relationship with partial information sharing (usually only the good stuff) is going to do this. Compared to 1980s media (TV/print/movies) the internet has just allowed several orders of magnitude more people to put themselves "out there" and get caught up in various aspects of the same old games.
🌻🌻 [google.com]