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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:18PM
It's possible the top level DNC has an evil masterplan to create a permanent dependent group of voters. But the bigger problem is that the bottom 40% of jobs for unskilled and low skilled workers in the 1950s paid far better, relative to inflation, than they did in the 1980s or since. In order to stop using SNAP you need a path out. That path was taken away, and that's more a credit to the attacks on labor unions and minimum wage by the RNC.
I've brought up this story before, but in the early 1970s my father worked in a car battery factory stacking batteries making 6 times minimum wage. I worked the same job in the same factory 25 years later, and I made 1.3 times minimum wage. If someone living in that town today is on SNAP, who is to blame - the Democrats for promoting SNAP, or the Republicans (or both parties) for shifting the job market so that any time a job that pays so much as $12 an hour opens, you have 250 people apply for it?