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| Wildflower in our back yard |
A good part of my week, every week, is meeting with people. I actually physically get together with them and look them in the eye and talk with them. I see their facial expressions, I hear their undigitized voice. I attend to them. We are in each other's presence, as much as one could be.
Linda and I are in a Home Group. This is a small group of 14 people who meet once a week to share our lives with, study Scripture together, and pray with and for one another. This, for me, is one of life's oases. We meet, whole-being-wise, as friends. Face-to-face. Facelook.
Facelooking precedes Facebooking.
"I" am on Facebook. Facebook has a place for me, but it's a far cry from Facelook. Facelook is therapy for loneliness. Facebook can be, and is for many, a lonely place that breeds loneliness. So writes Stephen Marche in his Atlantic essay Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Here are some bullets.
- Social media has made us more densely networked. But new research suggests that we have never been lonelier, and we are more narcissistic than ever. This loneliness is making us physically and mentally ill. We're now in the midst of an "epidemic of loneliness."
- Our social connectedness has grown broader but shallower. "We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible... within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information."
- Loneliness and being alone are not the same things. Solitude can be good. "Loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state."
- Ten years ago 20% of adults 45 and older were chronically lonely. Today that number is 35%. "According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness."
- "It is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy." We are now facing "social disintegration."
- Loneliness makes life harder, physically and emotionally. "If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline." Yet in spite of this "loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving... We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely."
- Enter Facebook, which is leading us further into social isolation and loneliness. What intends to make us a great circle of "friends" is leaving us friendless. "Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?"
- Composed communication (letter-writing) on Facebook can increase our socail capital and thereby decrease loneliness; "liking" ("the lazy click of a like) leaves the lonely person lonely.
- "On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to [Moira] Burke [until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon], passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression."
- "John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness... [He writes that] surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh... The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either."
- "In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.".... But “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy."
- Facebook doesn't make us lonely. Facebook is but a tool, like a car; it depends on how we drive it. We make ourselves lonely, or not.
- "Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.
But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting."
A Facebook connection is not the same thing as a bond. "Instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect."
