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

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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:05PM (#1010456)

    Was still relatively easy to get out.

    Bullshit. If you're too sick, you're not getting out (can't hold down a job). If you're otherwise healthy but get sick at the wrong time, you're not getting out (you had a good job, but you were sick for two weeks and got fired). If there are no good employers near you, you can't find a good job and you can't save up enough to move somewhere with better job options. Maybe you could if you were friends with someone living near a better job - but that's not a 'relatively easy' thing, either. If none of your childhood role models were good people, able to impress upon you the value of education and hard work, you wouldn't even understand what you can do to get out.

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