In-Person Socialization Down, but Social Media Isn't to Blame:
Jeffrey Hall is passionate about two things in particular – friendship and social media – and he thinks the latter is too often mistaken as the enemy of the former.
[...] "The social displacement hypothesis is probably the most well-known, long-lasting explanation for where time spent using new technologies — from the internet to texting, and now social media — comes from," Hall said. "The social displacement argument says that new media cuts into our face-to-face time. The best available evidence suggests it's just not so."
Hall took data on FtF time from the U.S. Department of Labor's annual American Time Use Survey and from similar governmental studies in Australia and Great Britain between 1995 and 2021 and plotted them on a single chart. All three lines decline over time at a similar rate.
[...] "The fact that the U.K. data track U.S. data so tightly despite using slightly different methods in different years is surprising," Hall said.
This international trend of reduced time in face-to-face communication may reflect growing rates of loneliness, according to the authors.
[...] "The best available evidence suggests face-to-face is in competition with hours spent at work and commuting," Hall said. In other words, people who work longer spend more of their leisure time alone. During the pandemic, when people got that time back from commuting, "They still spent it working virtually," Hall said. "They didn't spend it socializing with each other.
"It seems we live in a society that privileges working and media consumption over everything else," Hall said. "The decline in face-to-face time is a matter of priority and a matter of availability. And we are neither prioritizing face-to-face time, nor are we available to do so."
Journal Reference:
Jeffrey Hall and Dong Liu, Social media use, social displacement, and well-being, Cur. Op. in Psych., 46, 2022
DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101339"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday May 09 2022, @09:35AM
If you try to substitute the latter with the former, you have problems. And yes, I said that, someone who can't stand being in the same room as humans.
Social media is a tool to facilitate communication with people. It is certainly unsuitable to substitute friends. If you fall for that trap, you get influenza who pretend to be your friends while selling you crap.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday May 09 2022, @09:36AM (11 children)
I was wondering about the impact of Covid19 on the subject, but couldn't find the chart that TFA is about anywhere (or unavailable within 3 clicks).
I was also wondering if the risen cost of living would be a contributing factor to this decline, because going out as a whole has become more expensive (including transportation costs, while the rise of Uber and ilk might have flattened it a little bit).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by inertnet on Monday May 09 2022, @09:49AM (10 children)
I may get down modded for this, but I'm convinced that things like '#metoo' and the cancel culture that's getting stronger, are having an impact on how easy it is for kids to make friends. I see this happening with my own children, who are hesitant in their interactions because of fear of doing something wrong. Just as an observation without judging which is better, they're living in a completely different world compared to when I was young.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @11:19AM (6 children)
I think you're greatly exaggerating fears of cancel culture and #metoo. If anything, your kids are probably hesitant because they have a parent who has convinced them that they should fear cancel culture and #metoo. There were always people who are far too thin-skinned on both sides of the political spectrum. But if you just follow common sense, you don't really have a lot to worry about from #metoo. Like we all learned in kindergarten, keep your hands and feet to yourself. People who can't do that and can't refrain from talking about sex where it never belonged are the ones who get in trouble. There's also the issue where there's a power differential, and someone in authority uses their position to exploit others. But that issue isn't limited to #metoo, and that's not something your kids have to worry about. You're rather exaggerating things if you're really concerned about #metoo.
As for cancel culture, you can avoid a lot of issues by just not bringing politics and closely related issues into your interactions with other people. That's really common sense as well because politics tends to be inherently divisive and always has been. If you want to make friends, don't talk about things that are likely to cause conflict. Politics tends to be at the top of the list of things that cause conflict. Sure, you might run into someone whose skin is so thin that they can't handle even the tiniest perceived slight, but that's not true of most people.
If your evidence for your hypothesis is your children, I think it's a case of selection bias. If you tell your kids that they need to fear cancel culture and #metoo, then they'll probably do so.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @01:01PM (2 children)
Miss Manners always advised that it is probably best to avoid the topics of politics and religion in idle cocktail party chatter and to save those subjects for venues where they can be given more serious treatment.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday May 09 2022, @01:37PM
Because those subjects do need discussion, and not mere idle chatter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @05:58PM
Cute ancient advice. But in 2020s America, everything is religious and political.
You are profiled what side you are on by either wearing or not wearing a face rag. Whether you chose to vacation in Florida or Colorado.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by inertnet on Monday May 09 2022, @09:51PM (1 child)
I'm not exaggerating because my oldest literally told me these things. It's exactly opposite of what you're assuming. I have many great discussions with him and I often tell him what my youth was like. I wish he would have more freedom like I used to have, but he'll often say: "you can't do that nowadays". Even the advice you're giving, to "avoid a lot of issues" is exactly what I mean, because back then we didn't have to avoid anything. You're proving my point with every sentence.
Even the down modding is exactly as I expected. I'm really sad, not because of the down modding, but it just acknowledges how bad things really have become.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by rpnx on Tuesday May 10 2022, @03:29PM
#metoo has killed socialization.
Actually, probably a huge impact is that men have been taught not to socialize at work because of fear of being accused of harassment. This makes them view work as "no-social" and that's going to impact socialization rates. Surprising nobody with a brain.
If men were allowed to find romantic relationships at work then I imagine socialization would go up and there would be less suicides in both men and women.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2022, @09:07PM
That question was settled by at least the 1970s. Maybe you're too young to remember "The personal is the political!" but it was a rallying-cry for quite a few groups, notably feminists with a desire to dictate to other women how they should run their relationships. Well, perhaps it was predictable, but now everything is political from which car you drive, to the clothes that you wear, to your medical choices, including the degree to which you broadcast or fail to broadcast them, to the words that you choose to use while discussing ostensibly innocuous topics, to how much you apologise for getting something wrong in someone else's eyes ...
There is no escape, there is no excuse. Everything is now always political, with crusading people desperately trying to be more crusading than the next so that they can be on top of their mutual admiration society.
Can't blame the kids for observing that reality.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @11:34AM (2 children)
I've been all too aware of things changing.
I find the changes alarming, yet my own generation hasn't made sense to me either.
Didn't Plato write of this very same thing?
https://lifelanders.blogspot.com/2008/10/socratesplato-complaining-of-youth.html [blogspot.com]
I believe this is why we must age, get out of the way, and release the reins to our children to make of this what they will.
Otherwise, if senility doesn't do me on, insanity will.
Maybe my mind has gotten like concrete. With no way to reset the experience accumulators. My entire perception of reality is derived from my experience.
It may not be all that relevant for everyone else.
Maybe age does that to people...I am becoming much more accepting of the meme that for me, the show is coming to a close, take what I have, and try to get it into the hands of someone else who needs it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Monday May 09 2022, @10:00PM
That's why I wrote "Just as an observation without judging which is better". Because the past is gone and there's no point in trying to stay in it. The world is changing, I consider myself to be just an observer, not someone who'll tell others how to live their lives. That's how I started this, as an observer. But not everybody seems to recognize this, which ironically I'll also consider a sign of the times.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2022, @12:31AM
Who? Your link is to a blog of a "life-coach".
Hesiod was not Socrates, Hesiod wanted young people to get off his lawn. Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth, so he probably thought the kids were alright.
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday May 09 2022, @02:03PM (1 child)
I don't think I'd seek out people to talk with. I'd probably just be a hermit out in the woods somewhere. Probably die from a random FBI bullet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @02:15PM
Only if you were spreading disinformation, like the government is not out to selflessly help other people.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday May 09 2022, @02:39PM (7 children)
It's suburbs. We sprawled and sprawled and sprawled and made people fucking sit in cars by themselves by an amount increasing by about 30 seconds a day per year for decades now.
And we put more and more and more Americans into an homes with zero common space or shared time with neighbors.
We design our entire physical goddamn world around an ideal of being yeoman landowners, but do it in a way that still serves a central-capital-production economic design and crams us all into spaces that don't allow for the essential freedom that ideal is intended to provide. Instead of farmsteads and home crafts, we get Home Owners Associations nitpicking lawn quality and Quick Pass lanes.
And the alternative is living in cities designed to funnel as many of those suburban car-owners past your home each day as possible. America is an unintentionally designed experience to maximize dehumanization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @03:35PM (1 child)
What the hell are you on about?
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Monday May 09 2022, @03:48PM
A fact only the truly wise can see.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday May 09 2022, @04:50PM
Non-HOA cul-de-sac here, work from home, CNC machine shop in the garage. I get in the car about once a week.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @06:02PM (3 children)
Do you not know about this thing called the Internet, where information instantly travels across huge distances? An awful lot of jobs do not and have not for the past two years required trucking it into some shithole city just so you can plop down in front of another Internet connected computer.
Many other jobs require people to meet in person, but they don't have to all drive into the shithole city. They work in the suburbs. Jobs have been moving into the suburbs for decades. The city doesn't offer most people anything of value. Cities have turned into amusement parks for urbanites: a place to play and "hang out." Eat at a restaurant, go to a music festival in the park, all that leisure stuff.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday May 09 2022, @07:10PM
It doesn't matter what I personally do if the average amount of time people spend in cars increases at a stupendous rate atomizing society. These problems aren't personal, but systemic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2022, @05:06PM
A pretty considerable amount of this is due to the fact there are commercial alternatives to driving to the store or looking for niche specialty shops. For a long while it's been the case that, were you to have an adequate money supply, you would never need to venture out of the house.
WFH is a privilege for the privileged, anyways. You can't WFH manual labor, that includes stocking retail shelves, servicing retaurants, bars, hotels, sewers, construction et cetera - y'know all the shit that actually makes the world go 'round. But all the chair jockey fucks get to polish their pretensions.
And what you're saying is just plain wrong, there is a set demand for labor, some people - the poorest most likely, will be forced into the city. The real poor assume the role of debt peons or get pressed out.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2022, @06:55PM
But as someone that works at home, socializing did get harder. When I lived in a small town, visiting local friends was a 1-10 minute walk. Now that I'm in the suburbs, visiting friends that are local by suburb standards is a 5-30 minute drive. Even before the pandemic, my social life was shit.
That's not to say that small town or big city living is all unicorns and rainbows. They have their own drawbacks. But suburb living erodes in-person relationships.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @06:40PM
i wonder, if the "algorithem" gets empowered enough to physically get you eye-to-eye close to the "prince" or "princess" you've been following and adoring online, how long it will take before you automatically clutch your social-media-outlet device and divert attention to it and start social-media-ing about the person standing infront of you?