Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
FROM The Atlantic
YVETTE VICKERS, A former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her
role in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman , would have been eighty-three last August,
but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los
Angeles coroner's report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a
neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and
yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the
door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing
that barricaded the house. Upstairs she found Vickers's body, mummified, near a
heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the
empty space.
The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined MUMMIFIED BODY OF FORMER PLAYBOY
PLAYMATE YVETTE VICKERS FOUND IN HER BENEDICT CANYON HOME, which quickly went
viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati's count, Vickers's lonesome death was
already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been
a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood's capacity to exploit our most basic
fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of
horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more
attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no
children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she
had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage
later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers's phone bills for
clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her
grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant
fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.
Vickers's web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened
for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable
to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past
three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be
out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million,
800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times.
Yet 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.
At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook,
with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes
to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will
make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put
the company's potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than
the global coffee industry--one addiction preparing to surpass the other.
Facebook's scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer Facebook became,
by some counts, the first website to receive 1 trillion page views in a month.
In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion
"likes" and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge
Facebook--as a company, as a culture, as a country--it is vast beyond
imagination.
Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has,
from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction
of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network as a bastard with symptoms of
Asperger's syndrome was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook,
if not to Zuckerberg. The film's most indelible scene, the one that may well
have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg
sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking
and waiting and clicking--a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in
amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen,
hungering for a response.
When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program
specifies that you should include only "your real friends, the ones you feel
comfortable sharing private details with." That one little phrase, your real
friends --so quaint, so charmingly mothering--perfectly encapsulates the
anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is
interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us
lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it
seemed designed to conquer.
Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and
intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site's promise of
greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than
ever before. In 1950 less than 10 percent of American households contained only
one person. By 2010 nearly 27 percent of households had just one person.
Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his
recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist
at NYU, writes: "Reams of published research show that it's the quality, not
the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness." True. But
before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées
dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore
pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated,
steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with
their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is
rising sharply. It's loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.
We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing.
Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a
growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of
external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from
a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness
has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as
neuroticism or anxiety.
Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The
best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness
Scale, a series of twenty questions that all begin with this formulation: "How
often do you feel . . . ?" As in "How often do you feel that you are 'in tune'
with the people around you?" And "How often do you feel that you lack
companionship?" Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have
shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history.
A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than forty-five were
chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade
earlier. 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.
The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising
preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might
assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only under certain
circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one
journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one's
spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in
God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of
religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw
God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were
less lonely. "The mere belief in God," the researchers concluded, "was
relatively independent of loneliness."
But 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. The
decrease in confidants--that is, in quality social connections--has been
dramatic over the past twenty-five years. In one survey, the mean size of
networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in
2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one
with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one
such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had
only one confidant.
In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of
replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald
Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late
1940s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000
social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010,
the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers,
400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists,
105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000
nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in
therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants
is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have
outsourced the work of everyday caring.
We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal
breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an
issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. 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.
Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a
greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her.
And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the
first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you
flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a
McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness
is at the American core, a byproduct of a long-standing national appetite for
independence: the Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and
strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They
did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their
autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier
likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The
ultimate American icon is the astronaut. Who is more heroic, or more alone? The
price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But
Americans have always been willing to pay that price.
Today the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of
the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state
and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American
poem is Whitman's "Song of Myself." The great American essay is Emerson's
"Self-Reliance." The great American novel is Melville's Moby-Dick , the tale of
a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him.
American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal
authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism "the great
watchword of American life."
Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for
isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities
that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion,
also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read
like attempts to impose solidarity--as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of
the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold,
from Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism --the ones who huddle together for
warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.
We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book
Bowling Alone , Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic postwar decline of
social capital--the strength and value of interpersonal networks--to numerous
interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television's dominance
over culture, the self-absorption of the baby boomers, the disintegration of
the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity
of the aughts and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union
membership declined in 2011 again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks
continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be
lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.
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?
Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for
isolation to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started
calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a
lack of human contact the "Internet paradox." A prominent 1998 article on the
phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased
Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the
study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the
study--high-school journalism students who were heading to university and
socially active members of community development boards--were statistically
likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental
question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more
attracted to the Internet?
The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of
Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled
"Who Uses Facebook?" found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship
between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower
levels of "social loneliness"--the sense of not feeling bonded with
friends--but "significantly higher levels of family loneliness"--the sense of
not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact
with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family
relationships--or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships
in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook.
The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time
on Facebook: "One of the most noteworthy findings," they wrote, "was the
tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time
on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals." And they found that neurotics
are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat
features in addition to the wall.
Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute
at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users.
That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of
self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader
population over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what
you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If
you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals--by using the
"like" button, commenting on friends' posts, and so on--it can increase your
social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls "composed
communication," are more satisfying than "one-click communication"--the lazy
click of a like. "People who received composed communication became less
lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change
in loneliness," Burke tells me. So you should inform your friend in writing how
charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and
how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline
is, and how cool it is that she's at whatever concert she happens to be at.
That's what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook
message is the semipublic conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you
half ignore the other people who may be listening in. "People whose friends
write to them semipublicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,"
Burke says.
On the other hand, nonpersonalized 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 Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a
marginal increase in depression. "If two women each talk to their friends the
same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on
Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed," Burke
says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook
may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after
page of my friends' descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are,
and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they're all about to
eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the
farmers' market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because
they're so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury
dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other
people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.
Still, Burke's research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates
loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away
from Facebook too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation
is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk
alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a
platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study,
conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others
have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does
Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else
looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks
feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn't that make people feel lonely? "If
people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can
happen," Burke tells me. "They can feel worse about themselves, or they can
feel motivated."
Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.
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. In
his landmark book Loneliness , released in 2008, he revealed just how
profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human
physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the
morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: "When we drew blood
from our older adults and analyzed their white cells," he writes, "we found
that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter
the way genes were being expressed." Loneliness affects not only the brain,
then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your
whole body is lonely.
To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. "Forming
connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an
obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need," he writes. "But
surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing." The
"real thing" being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is
refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook's effect on society. Yes, he
allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook
friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression
this creates can be misleading. "For the most part," he says, "people are
bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to
Facebook." The idea that a website 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." Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook
and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely
a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user.
"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 can be terrific, if we use it properly," Cacioppo continues. "It's
like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone."
But hasn't the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely
they also created isolation. "That's because of how we use cars," Cacioppo
replies. "How we use these technologies can lead to more integration rather
than more isolation."
The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us
miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation
desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened
its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries, customers
stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived,
people stopped knocking on their neighbors' doors. Social media bring this
process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social
Computing Lab who studied the nature of people's connections on Twitter came to
a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: "Most of the links declared within
Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view." I have to wonder:
What other point of view is meaningful?
Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the
lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves.
Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our
actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not
the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced
with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I
always, without exception, choose the machine. It's faster and more efficient,
I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other
customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who
disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the
point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine
will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience
that I don't possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up
the groceries myself.
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. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss
at the University of Denver published a study looking into "the paradoxical
effects of valuing happiness." Most goals in life show a direct correlation
between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that
students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don't
value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing
conclusion:
Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact,
under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but
not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their
hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the
higher their depression symptoms.
The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly
the same point.
Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our
digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and
personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data mining and privacy
practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most
compelling critics of Facebook--neither of them a Luddite--concentrate on
exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget , was one
of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media
are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: "I fear that we are
beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a
leaching of empathy and humanity in that process." Lanier argues that Facebook
imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the
site's crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.
Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the
digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen , is much more skeptical about the
effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: "These days,
insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology
for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same
time." 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.
But they are the ties that preoccupy," she writes. "We don't want to intrude on
each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in 'real
time.'"
Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on
Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony
nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. ("Look how
casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300
photos!") Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study "Who Uses Facebook?" found
a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: "Facebook users
have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than
Facebook nonusers," the study's authors wrote. "In fact, it could be argued
that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual's need to
engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior."
Rising narcissism isn't so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends.
In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric
profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic
personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that
narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for
attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents
were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality
disorder. Among people older than sixty-five, 3 percent reported symptoms.
Among people in their twenties, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across
all age groups, one in sixteen Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD.
And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of
Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth
and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism
is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from
the messy reality of other people.
A considerable part of Facebook's appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of
distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of
intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image
becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it
allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation
with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new
isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of
the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the
astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook's isolation is a grind. What's
truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume--750 million
photographs uploaded over a single weekend--but the constancy of the
performance it demands. More than half its users--and one of every thirteen
people on Earth is a Facebook user--log on every day. Among eighteen- to
thirty-four-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and
28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so
new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take
a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation.
But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.
Yvette Vickers's computer was on when she died.
Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless,
it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new
machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what
isn't being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about
human nature--and this is not a minor revelation--is that a connection is not
the same thing as a bond, and that 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.
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