Some Concerns About Facebook

“Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?” asks novelist Stephen Marche in this troubling article in The Atlantic. He quotes John Cacioppo (University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience): “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact, it increases social capital… It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive it alone.” 

“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,” says Marche. “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 spilled drink 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… [However,] the more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.” 

Sherry Turkle (MIT professor of computer culture) continues the thought: “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 ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy. We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’” 

“Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends,” concludes Marche. “And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected… 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… 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 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… 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…

“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.” 

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche in The Atlantic, May 2012 (Vol. 309, #4, p. 60-69), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/

From the Marshall Memo #471