"Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"

That is the question that Stephen Marche asks and seeks to answer in his article by the same name in the May issue of The Atlantic:  "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"  The essay is in a similar vein to my two previous posts on new media (here and here).  And so it is worth drawing attention to it.  Among Mr. Marche's concluding thoughts are these:

Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. ... And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected ... 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 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.

These and related observations are not new to many of us.  But it is encouraging to see the more consistent highlighting of a real problem that is sometimes brushed off as Luddite lunacy.  Real relationships, self-reflection, salutary solitude, cultivation of confidants -- these are central to humanity and a healthy pursuit of life.  The substitution of these things through the use of technology is an important facet of contemporary life that we ignore to our peril.