Present society is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness.
With all the social media tools available to connect with each other, why are we feeling even lonelier?
Loneliness has been described as social pain — a psychological mechanism meant to alert an individual of isolation and motivate him/her to seek social connections.
Loneliness depends entirely on the subjective quality of your relationships on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you.
Loneliness does not depend on how many friends or relationships you have.
What makes a person lonely is the fact that they need more intimate social interaction that is not currently available to them.
While social media seems to be an obvious choice to reach out to other people when lonely, research demonstrates that instead of decreasing loneliness it may make people even lonelier.
A survey carried out in 2010 by the Mental Health Foundation found that 18-to 35-year-olds were more likely to feel lonely than the over-55s with more than a third saying they have less interaction with people they know than they did five years ago.
The more time people invest in building expansive social networks online, the quality of their offline networks and relationships diminishes.
Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. “
This is particularly pertinent for young or socially inexperienced individuals where online friendships may become too important, at the expense of deeper and stronger ties with friends and family in real life.
In an 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.”
Social intimacy is based on exposing the real self, exposing vulnerabilities and failings, openly sharing feelings without fear of judgement.
Social media encourages usersonly post content which shows their life in the best light and tend to report positive events rather than negative events that make us human.
Social media leads to a false pretence, that we should be happy all the time, often making us feel emptier by comparison.
This can have an alienating impact, particularly on young users that feel that their lives do not live up to social norms.
Social media is merely a tool, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. The depth of one’s social network off line is what determines the depth of one’s social network online, not the other way around.