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Tech and Social Media Make Us Feel Lonelier than Ever

posted by martyb on Friday June 19 2020, @09:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the only-the-lonely-can-play-♫♫ dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @07:58PM (#1010452)

    That's a fair point. Washing clothes isn't a tenth as resource-intensive as it was in 1900. Farming isn't as resource-intensive as it was in 1900. Medicine is more resource-intensive and more effective than it was in 1900. So as some jobs are automated away others do increase and new work does appear.

    But I am convinced a lot of the created work today is pointless work, created solely to occupy people:

    • Mountains of bureaucracy. Schools, hospitals, and businesses have far more middle management than decades past.
    • Service jobs of all kinds - Americans in the 1950s spent 25% of their annual food budget at restaurants, today it's over 50%. Plus there are more massage parlors, landscaping services, housecleaning services, and so forth.
    • Intentionally or not, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military actions create jobs in the oil industry, in military equipment manufacturing, and in ammunition manufacturing and they also create a huge number of jobs in logistics all over the world. Plus of course they employ hundreds of thousands of military personnel and their medical and other support staff. A cynic - or maybe just a realist - would say the 21st century US government has decided it likes war instead of FDR's Civil Works Administration and Civil Conservation Corps.

    Take all of that away, and I think the actual number of constructive jobs has been declining.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:28PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:28PM (#1010749) Journal

    Take all of that away, and I think the actual number of constructive jobs has been declining.

    Take that all away, and the people so employed could be (and IMHO would be) constructively employed. I'll note that the greatest creators of bureaucracy, governments, would be running the UBI programs.