Are We Lonelier on Facebook, Online?
A year can’t go by now without some pundit, writer, or researcher weighing in on how the more technology infiltrates our lives, the lonelier we’ve become.
Stephen Marche, a novelist writing in the May 2012 Atlantic, weaves together a bunch of anecdotes to suggest that Facebook is making us lonelier.
Renowned MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, who bases her conclusions on an endless stream of in-vitro interviews with teens and young adults, suggested over the weekend in the New York Times that technology is certainly making us more connected… but those connections are more shallow and less rich that traditional face-to-face connections.
These are interesting observations, but are they offering us a false dichotomy? Or suggesting a causal relationship where none has yet been established?
Marche kicks off the false dichotomy argument by asking questions like:
The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?
Research has some answers to these questions, which Marche explores to some degree in his 5,344 word essay. What the data actually demonstrate is a fairly complicated relationship — one mediated by personality, psychological resilience, social factors, and frequency of use of the technology. It’s not going to be this nice, clean, black-and-white false dichotomy that so many writers yearn for.
In other words, it’s a dumb question to ask because the answer isn’t one that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Facebook has no more power to “make” us lonely than reading a book or watching television does.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/04/25/are-we-lonelier-on-facebook-online/
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