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Social Media 'Increases Loneliness', Says Study (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are causing more people to feel alone, according to US psychologists. A report suggests that more than two hours of social media use a day doubled the chances of a person experiencing social isolation. It claims exposure to idealised representations of other people's lives may cause feelings of envy. The study also looked at those using Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr. "We do not yet know which came first - the social media use or the perceived social isolation," co-author Elizabeth Miller, professor of paediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh, said. "It's possible that young adults who initially felt socially isolated turned to social media. Or it could be that their increased use of social media somehow led to feeling isolated from the real world." Theories in the report suggest the more time a person spends online, the less time they have for real-world interactions.
Do you talk to people (vocally, in person) in real life outside of business or work more or less often after Facebook opened its doors?
Back before Facebook bought out MySpace it was actually a great place to meet people with similar interests. It's the move toward user data as the product (and locking down search/browsing functionality to those already in a network) plus the attempt to monopolize a thing (Uber for driving, Facebook for sharing, OKCupid for dating, etc) that is killing the ability to actually socialize because social media platforms are only useful tools to that end when they increase actual connections rather than serve to catalog a person's connections.
Geez ... no comments ... I'm so bummed out :|
Theories in the report suggest the more time a person spends online, the less time they have for real-world interactions.
If time spent on social media was worth as much as time spent in the real world, you could argue that it balances out. Unfortunately, time spent on social media is mostly time wasted on social media. The quality of interactions just isn't there. So in the final analysis, social media degrades the quality of the user's life.
Of course, that void then creates a hunger for contact, which the user tries to fill with still more social media use, because it's easy to do, rather than get off your butt and walk the dog, pick up the phone and call someone, or knock on your neighbor's door and ask them if they want to come over for coffee or tea.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Isn't this giving people what they want? And what is pinterest? Half the pictures that show up on a google image search require me to create an account to look at them.
My problem with facebook, and all social media, is that it doesn't level the playing field. Its all about popularity. Its about the amount of likes you get and the amount of friends you have and the most this and the most that. Its all about metrics for marketing. That's all they care about. From it, we get a lame experience. If you remove the popularity aspect of things from social media it would be a great place.
The sheep are so scared to stop rudely shoving their thumbs on their treacherous so-called "smart" so-called "telephones," they have lost all ability to interact with the real world anyway. Your papers please. Move along, nothing to see.
Is this what we wanted personal computers to become?
You clods...you inconsiderate clods...(crying)
Meh. without social media I'd have essentially no human interaction outside of work.
Net plus. Interestingly, many of those social contacts date back to Usenet days...
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Theories in the report suggest the more time a person spends online, the less time they have for real-world interactions.
By this logic, the more time a person spends mowing the lawn, the less time they have for real-world interactions.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Social media is a way to increase connectedness, especially among friends, and share experiences.
But it's an augmentation of, not a substitution for, actual social experiences.
If you're looking online and all you're seeing are gatherings of friends you're not at, families you never started, and vacation spots you couldn't go to, then sure, it will certainly increase your own feelings of want. If you have a rich social life, or one that you're comfortable with, then "social media" is unlikely to have that much of an isolating effect. But if a greater social experience is something you really want, even if you tell yourself that you don't, then it shouldn't be a surprise that you'd feel lonely.
I think this was the basic premise of a Robyn Williams movie from the 90's.
This is true. Facebookers are lonely. That's why I spend my quality time with my real friends: the Slashdot forum community. The warmth, understanding, and charitable attitudes I find on Slashdot help me make it through the day, and always lead me to an accurate assessment of the tech news.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
A huge issue with social media is that you are locked into your own beliefs, creating a cult like atmosphere. This is not just time being wasted, it's time being used to self destructive ends. A person can not grow intellectually living in an echo chamber surrounded by controlled thoughts. Companies know this, and cash in on it. This is "The Allegory of the Cave" in action.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Most of my issues with interacting with humans is I'm pretty quiet and introverted. Many times I can't come up with a response quickly enough when speaking. By the time I've thought of something to contribute, the conversation has moved on. And I have a problem with interrupting others when they're speaking that seems absent from others. I'm in a meeting, for example, and my contributions are minimal in part because the talking is non-stop and you can't get a word in edge-wise.
With BBS's back in the 80's, Usenet and EMail in the 80's and 90's, EMail lists and Discussion groups in the '00's, and Forums and Facebook now, I can read and respond at my leisure. I don't even like talking on the phone.
Even this post. I've rewritten bits of it several times, added words, changed structure, and even considered whether or not it would provide any valuable insights before posting it.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Nice clickbait headline that says one thing when the very summary says they don't know if social media is the cause or the result of social isolation.
Anyway, the last line is of particular stupidity. "heories in the report suggest the more time a person spends online, the less time they have for real-world interactions."
We have a constant amount of time each day. If you're spending more time on the computer then YES you have less time for the real world. How is that just a theory rather than fact?
It claims exposure to idealised representations of other people's lives may cause feelings of envy
I never thought posting photographs taken aboard my luxury yacht as it cruised around tropical islands might have an adverse affect on someone else.
Without getting into the nitty gritty I have had challenges with general anxiety disorder / agoraphobia for a while and the combination of telecommuting / computer-based hobbies I don't leave my house very often. And by "very often" I can probably count on my hands the number of hours I've been outside in the last 2-3 months.
Social media gives me a distraction I can pull up at any time and people to talk to, which is great for the ol' depression (sort of, I'll get into that later) it connects me in ways I never thought were possible before. Whether or not the kind of interactions I have are more or less healthy I can't say but I do know there are a couple things that I see in others that are damaging.
The main things I find actively damaging about having a life through social media as I see them:
1. If somebody is being a jerk you can passive-aggressively remove them from your life, I mean this happens in IRL but sometimes you can't escape people like this (work, family) so there's a tendency to craft the people you follow / interact with socially online. I think this becomes a problem because you get into a group-think type situation where you bury yourself in only one side of anything. If I ONLY loved Star Trek I wouldn't follow a Star Wars person, that makes sense, but when I bury myself solely in Star Trek people it can warp me. I try to be careful about it and ensure I have a good variety of people / communities I take part in but there are some people who are so super-focused they only expose themselves to a narrow world and it really is surprising how it changes their thinking over time.
2. Social media is gamified, that fact is NOT obvious to most people who use it. There are a lot of people who really stress about how many notes, likes, reblogs, +s, thumbs up, etc they are or aren't getting. They associate their personal value to these metrics. I'm aware of this and yet it still invades my thoughts, it's potent and it adds stress to the activity, this kind of stress leads to more depression, you have a social circle and you can now "measure yourself" by these gamified metrics. It's really bad and in general it makes depressed people even more depressed.
The good side is I feel connected and sociable the bad side is it manipulates me into using it more. I think ultimately it's bad for me because it has become a total replacement for going out, it gives me tools that make it easier to not want to go out, which is not good if you're agoraphobic.
On the flipside I have met local people online that have forced me to go out and do things I would not have done otherwise, like attending a comic convention for four days straight / going out to celebrate friends' birthdays / going out for coffee (who does that?). When things are bad though its always there for me, which I don't think is particularly healthy.
As always YMMV
crazy dynamite monkey
I think there might be another mechanism involved: social media groups have become the primary method for organising real-life interaction and compared to the old fashioned ad-hoc approaches, this has a rather unfortunately side-effect: once you're out of the loop, you're out of the loop. It's easy to join a real-life conversation but it's impossible to join in a whatsapp-group you don't even know about.
0x or or snor perron?!
Increased loneliness vs the chance of missing baby wombat videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"We do not yet know which came first - the social media use or the perceived social isolation,"
. . . so we just said, "fuck it!", and committed the most notorious fallacy of pop science and muddled the distinction betwee (sic) correlation and causation
How is acknowledging that they don't know what the actual causation or correlation is "muddling the distinction between correlation and causation"?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Hahahaa! Can I borrow a feeling! [Simpsons quote.]
I've been saying what they're saying about so-called 'social media' for years now; it gives people a reason to stay apart, not so much 'bringing people together'. Sure, if you're separated by thousands of miles, it can help you keep in touch with what's going on with people you know. But so do phone calls and, to a lesser extent, emails. Too many people use so-called 'social media' as more of a 'social substitute'. The problem is anything on a computer screen is not a substitute for real, live interaction with other people. If you're young, I can see 'social media' being devastating to your development of social skills: people can say and do all sorts of things on the internet that you'd never dare do in a real-life situation, because the consequences are so much less, or non-existent. And, of course, so-called 'social media' really exists to monetize people and their personal lives, not to provide any great service to humanity. All in all so-called 'social media', in my opinion, is rather destructive and we'd be better off with less of it and more live interaction.
It's letting the lonely people tell you about it. Every day, filling up my feed with bleak stock art and Comic Sans overlay text.
Where is the link to the original study? The only valuable piece of information in the whole article is: "We do not yet know which came first - the social media use or the perceived social isolation". As to correlation between social isolation and active use of "social media", it is neither new nor particularly surprising.
if loneliness is INCREASING, then someone has found a way to quantify loneliness - how do you do that? is it relative to an individual, or is to some kind of jungian loneliness total for humanity? is loneliness a constant, where if person A is more lonely, then person B is less lonely? the quantification of loneliness itself is more interesting than this article...
How is a headline that says "Social media increases loneliness" not muddling the distinction between correlation and causation?
GP was probably referring to the headline, summary, and comments such as your own that take the idea that "social media increases loneliness" as somehow supported by the research. The quote you specifically acknowledge directly contradicts that assertion, yet it didn't stop you and several others from writing a polemic based on its being factual...
Good catch on the typo, though. Very helpful.
"We do not yet know which came first - the social media use or the perceived social isolation,"
Well depending on your definition, social media really became mainstream somewhere between 2001 and 2010, its 2017. No one can think back 18 years of see if they felt more or less socially isolated?
I've always been socially isolated (for the most part and would rather be that way so I know my origins. Whats their excuse?
You basically have two options in the "advanced" society:
1) Accept your media programming to become irrational ravenous consumers that are only drawn to fake boobies, blinky lights, reality television and anything that projects if you just buy X you will live fantasy Y
2) Screw #1 and deal with reality with all its ups and downs, good, bad and indifferent things and just be thankful for having the opportunity to experience existence and admit you don't know a lot of shit
If you pick #2 you will be lonely because you will separate yourself from all the delusional morons in the #1 camp. If you pick #1 and you are actually somewhat intelligent, you will want to shoot yourself. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
We'll make great pets
Same here with my disabilities like speech and hearing. When I discovered online communications like BBSes and Internet, I was way more social than I had been. Although, it is still frustrating when people still refuse to them to communicate with me. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't use social media and I have no friends. But that's because I put no effort into making any friends. A decade or two ago, after a mostly-friendless youth, I decided that I wanted to have a social life in my college years, and put effort into it. Then I had an enormous number of friends and social things to do every day of every weekend.
In time I realized I wasn't getting enough out of that to be worth the effort, so now I don't try, and besides weekends with my girlfriend (where we still don't socialize with anyone besides each other) the most socialization I get is saying "thank you" and "have a nice night" to the grocery store clerk.
But I'm not lonely. If I wanted to have more of a social life and couldn't, then I would be lonely. But just not having a social life because I can't be bothered isn't loneliness.
Maybe all the people on Facebook and Twitter see other people socializing and imagine that those people are happier than them and that it's because of the socialization, and that makes them want more social life than they have (whether because they're not good at making friends or just don't have the time for it), which makes them sad.
Like the Buddhists say, desire is the root of suffering. Stop wanting to be social, stop thinking it will make you happy, stop thinking those people on your FaceSpace pages are happier than you, because they're not, they're just trying to fill the void in themselves the same as you, but it doesn't really work. Stop wanting something that wouldn't make you happy anyway and you will stop suffering for the lack of it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Only to those who don't read the article, perhaps? The same article that goes into detail to explain how we don't know which came first, the use of social media, or the sense of isolation, or if there's not a self-selection process going on where people who would be isolated anyway tend to go to social media?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Anyone who actually read the article would be aware that no causal chain has been identified - yet - in this study. However, such studies are not isolated from real world existence. Sitting in the same room as someone who is glued to their phone is like going to the movies - you're both sitting in the same place, but there's no real communications going on, except for their occasional grunting OMG or LOL or WTF.
I've visited people where all the adults and kids are glued to the wifi, each doing their separate thing (game video, facebook, twitter, game, whatever), and after a while I left to join the real world. They didn't even notice. Same as the woman who was so glued to her phone that she walked between 2 subway cars and got herself killed. Just off in a fake world of their own where the people beside them are just ghosts because they're not maintaining a digital presence that is directly in their view.
Now to the real point: Does it matter which comes first? We've identified a problem, We don't have to know everything about it to try to come up with solutions. We know that usage over 2 hours is an indicator of increased isolation. Doesn't matter if it causes the isolation, or if it's because people who are prone to isolation tend to spend more time on social media. The isolation itself is a danger to mental health, and cutting down the usage is an obvious action to take.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, that's the point of a headline - to be what you read in lieu of reading the article. If the article seems worth it (it doesn't, in this case), you can then read the article.
Susan Sontag once wrote a book in 1977 called On Photography. While it was about that specific portion of media, it is illuminating to compare her thoughts on what photography is and isn't and juxtapose it with modern social media. In a nutshell, she compares photography as simply one more way for humanity to continue looking at the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave instead of turning around and seeing the real world. Photography, as well as social media, is a way for a person to remove themselves from the world while creating the illusion that they are in it. She makes a good point that photographs seem to furnish evidence, for example. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we see a photo of it (but does it?). She flatly states that one can never understand anything from a photograph, because understanding is rooting in the mechanism of action: it takes place in time. The amorous relation is based on a thing's appearance, but understanding something is about how it functions. We're drowning in the paradoxical banality of mystery: Social media, or pictures, can only show the surface of anything, but lacks almost all context. It can TRY to narrate but cannot, and only narration brings understanding. It denies continuity and interconnectedness and is ultimately completely shallow. (Several people in the thread mentioned how looking on Facebook makes people think that all their friends are doing something awesome every day when most of the time is filler that isn't seen.)
Taking pictures and using social media is a way to convince ourselves that we're a part of something. Take vacations for example. In the past, people took vacations because they were fun, and when cameras became portable, it begged to be used for such an event to create keepsakes. Now, the situation is almost reversed: we go on vacations so that we can take pictures. We post the pictures online as if to prove to ourselves and to others that we actually went and had fun. But a significant portion of the vacation is spent in the act of taking pictures instead of having said fun. When a person takes a picture of something during an event, they are removing themselves from the activity and become an external observer, inherently denying themselves the experience. It is in this way that pictures and social media can increase the solitude of a person and become a compulsive, shallow replacement of a real life, leaving it hollow.
There's more to be said about it, I don't mean to close off other avenues of exploration with photography and social media. It does have positive impacts but it's also desensitizing to sex and violence. It is slowly removing the idea of privacy (google glasses and live streaming, the amount of cameras in London). It only increases society's addiction to consumerism and the need to stay busy, busy, busy. Did you know that there was a study done where all they did was take a test subject's phones and tablets away, left them in a room with the promise to come back and get them, and then see what happened? People started getting severely agitated. If there was a shocking device just happening to be left there by the researchers to see what happened, people started shocking themselves with the device (especially men, 64 percent of them, only 15 percent of women) rather than sit quietly with themselves. People just can't stand to be in their own heads.
By the way, I've never had a Facebook account, but now that I'm a returning adult in college, a Psychology major looking to go into research or forensics, I'm probably going to be forced to have a Facebook account. It might count against me if professionals and companies ask and find out that I'm not on social media.
Society in general has a real problem with ADHD, inability to soothe the self, consumerism and especially an addiction to smart phones. I make it a game that when I'm in a waiting room somewhere, if I see someone come in from the outside and sit down I make a guess as to how many seconds it takes before they pull out their phone. It's interesting, you should try it.
If you are on social media, you are having real-world interactions. The whole idea that our presence via technology is somehow illusory and insubstantial is false. The Internet is the "real world."
That said, to state the obvious, there are a number of non-verbal (heck, even some verbal) cues that are missing from on-line interaction. Sarcasm requires tags. We are still discovering why people can become so awful in text, why they are emboldened to be hateful (beyond just anonymity) when they never would do so in-person. But all of it is real. Those are real words, from real people, unless you're talking to an MS chat bot.
Whatever you see on social media is real people doing real things. Even if they're lying, they're really lying. It is probably better if we all took our on-line presence at least as seriously as we would behave in a bar, even if there is no chance of a fight breaking out. Calling it not the "real-world" keeps us from behaving with responsibility. Reject this false separation of worlds.
I never got on the LiveJournal bus, and I noticed that the people I hung out with were talking about things I didn't know about, and talking about events that I wasn't invited to because it was only mentioned on LiveJournal. Now with Facebook -- which is broken for me -- I see friends less and less often because they talk to each other through Facebook, and organize get-togethers solely through Facebook. They don't even use email, nevermind telephone calls anymore. And since I can't use Facebook, I'm left out.
It feels like I'm isolated because I'm not using (or able to use) social media enough to keep-up with my peers.