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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: 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]