Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely
networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research
suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and
that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report
on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our
society.
Y
vette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,
would have been 83 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.
Also see:
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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 Web site 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 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.
F
acebook 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 20 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 45 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 25 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 ’40s, 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 by-product 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 post-war 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?
W
ell 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 semi-public 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 semi-publicly on Facebook experience
decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.
On the other hand, non-personalized 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.
J
ohn 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 Web site 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?
L
oneliness 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 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s,
the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16
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 13
people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among
18-to-34-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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