The article titled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche is an intriguing piece of writing. Marche makes a lot interesting points, some that I agree with and some that I believe is just typical old-people-talk about how messed up things are nowadays. If you have not read the article I definitely recommend going through Marche’s thoughts and developing your own opinion on his arguments.
Marche says, “We are living in isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible.” People are all over the internet. With just a few clicks you can learn so much about someone’s life based on a Facebook profile alone. We can interact with hundreds, thousands, millions of people all from our desk chair. But is this really interaction? Marche doesn’t seem to believe so. And I would have to say that I agree with him. Sure we can keep in touch with friends, like their pictures, and instant message them. But at the end of the day we’re still just siting here by ourselves behind our computers. We aren’t going out and spending time with these people. We aren’t sustaining any meaningful contact. We may be accessible but that does not keep us out of isolation.
People are getting together to talk much less nowadays. With text messaging and instant messaging and social media, there isn’t any reason to get together and catch up. So when people do meet face to face with old friends it can be awkward and uncomfortable because we are spending too much time behind our screens and not enough time around real people. Marche talks about how we can check out groceries with machines these days. More times than not people will choose the machine over the cashier. “More efficient”, “faster”, “easier” they’ll say. But is that really why they choose to use the self-checkout? Or do they simply just not feel like dealing with other customers? Or do they not feel like small talking with the cashier? People are starting to avoid interaction with other people more than ever before.
One thing that I disagree with regarding to Marche’s points is his opinion on the increase professional carers throughout society. He states, “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.” While I agree that the increase in the the number of professional carers such as psychologists and therapists is astounding, I don’t necessarily believe that the increase in social media has affected this. It seems like issues that used to be brushed off as typical life problems are now being addressed as more serious issues. People are seeking mental health help more than ever before. However, I don’t think this is because Facebook is “making us more lonely”, but rather the people of the past had the same issues and there was simply no professional help for them. They just had to deal with these problems because no one knew how exactly to fix them. Whereas today, after extensive psychological research, we are able to manipulate people’s minds in order to help them with mental problems.
Overall I enjoyed reading this article. I thought Stephen Marche had a lot of thought-provoking ideas. I think that the impact of social media on society is irreversible whether that is for better or for worse. My only wish is that personal interaction between people can get back to where it was before there were so many alternative methods of communication.
(Images received at flickr.com)