Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

An article in the May issue of The Atlantic, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche, asks an important question.

Many if not most of us use Facebook, which has 845 million users and took in $3.7 billion last year. One of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user. Given our commitment to community, how should we approach this?

Other writers, such as Eric Klinenberg in his new book Going Solo, have pointed out the increasing isolation of Americans. He writes that in 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person, whereas in 2010, 27 percent of households had just one person.

But Marche is interested in the increase in loneliness, which, he says, “makes us miserable.”

At the same time, loneliness is hard to define or diagnose. He says the best tool is the UCLA Loneliness Scale. According to one major study, 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness.

Though loneliness and being alone are not the same, both are on the rise. “In 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters. … By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to.”

Further, Marche writes, “being lonely is extremely bad for your health.” Lonely people are more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an early age, less likely to exercise, more likely to be obese, less likely to survive a serious operation, more likely to be depressed and to suffer dementia.

Marche goes on to ask if Facebook contributes to loneliness or brings us together. Determining an answer is tricky. For example, he asks, “Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?”

Many studies have been done, and more are ongoing. John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, in his 2008 book Loneliness, notes that loneliness affects not only the brain but the basic process of DNA transcription.

Cacioppo says that Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing,” he writes. And “the real thing” is actual people, in the flesh.

He points out that “using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another.”

Our experience of loneliness corresponds to the proportion of face-to-face interactions to online interactions. “The greater proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.”

Cacioppo doesn’t blame the technology but calls it a tool. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.”

Sherry Turkle, in her 2011 book Alone Together, says that 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,” she writes.

An Australian study found that “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism and leadership than Facebook nonusers.”

And narcissism, Marche writes, “is the flip side of loneliness.”

He says the danger of Facebook is that it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.

More than half of Facebook users log on every day. He concludes: “Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.