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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: 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.