Posted: April 24th, 2025

COM 3471- Discussion Post 3

Discussion Topic

In a discussion post, analyze the issue of relationships in a digital age and link it to the broader discussion about how our “information society” has evolved and the challenges we are likely to face in the future.

-Make a connection to the readings, videos or recordings for the week.

-Post should be at least 3 paragraphs (500 words) in length.

VIDEOS: 

https://online.fiu.edu/videos/?vpvid=645f6b7e66064848a67cfd32608ea96d

https://online.fiu.edu/videos/?vpvid=fff1064e8df04eb69bf13a76a9aaaab1

ARTICLES:

1. Sherry Turkle, “The Flight from Conversation,”Actions New York Times, 2012.
2. Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”Actions The Atlantic, 2012.
3. Ronald W. Berkowsky, “When You Just Cannot Get Away,”Actions Information, Communication & Society, 2013.

.

10/26/15, 6:07 PMWhen you just cannot get away: Technology and work-life spillover – Journalist’s Resource Journalist’s Resource

Page 1 of 3http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/workers/when-you-just-cannot-get-away-technology-work-life-spillover

GENDER, INTERNET, SOCIAL MEDIA, WORKERS

When you just cannot get
away: Technology and work-
life spillover
Tags: facebook, technology, telecommunications, women and work | Last updated: April 5,

2013

(iStock)

The issue of whether or not U.S.
workplaces should allow more
telecommuting, and hence better work-
life balance, continues to create
controversy. But for many workers,
technology has proven a mixed blessing:
The Internet-enabled smartphone makes
one accountable to managers and
coworkers at all hours of the day, seven
days a week.

Researchers have been studying the
extent of this “work-home spillover” phenomenon and its impact on American life. Prior
scholarship has shown that employees with greater levels of ambition are more likely to use
communication technologies when not at work — but they are also likely to report having work-
life conflicts. Other research has focused on how technologies are associated with the creation
of more “supplemental work,” performed during off hours, and how, again, these are linked to
perceived conflicts. In principle, though, technology may afford some workers greater flexibility
and allow for more balance.

A 2013 study published in Information, Communication & Society, “When You Just Cannot Get
Away,” analyzed responses from 1,100 individuals who participated in the Work-Life and
Technology Use Survey, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The researcher looked
at the frequency of ICT (information and communication technologies) use and the relationship

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-society

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/internet

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/workers

http://journalistsresource.org/tag/facebook

http://journalistsresource.org/tag/technology

http://journalistsresource.org/tag/telecommunications

http://journalistsresource.org/tag/women-and-work

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/transportation/hard-truth-telecommuting

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/technology/yahoo-orders-home-workers-back-to-the-office.html

http://jom.sagepub.com/content/33/4/592

http://hum.sagepub.com/content/63/1/63.short

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2013.772650

http://journalistsresource.org/

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with perceived conflicts between work and home; respondents were asked whether jobs
interfered with family life (work-home), and if issues at home made workday activities more
difficult (home-work). The respondents were 68% female, 68% married or co-habitating, and
89% white. The researcher notes that this sample is not fully representative of the U.S.
population as a whole, and so the study must be seen as a window into these issues and not as
a valid national picture.

The study’s findings include:

Among the respondents, 63% reported checking their work email more than once a day
outside of office hours, and 61% reported checking personal email accounts while at
work multiple times a day.

With regard to work-home dynamics, more frequent use of email was associated with
negative spillovers: “These effects were found even when controlling for demographic
and employment characteristics, suggesting that ICT use may play a significant role in
defining the permeability of work/home boundaries and the negative consequences
associated with increased boundary-blurring.”

Frequent use of personal email and Facebook at work was associated with negative
spillovers from home life.

“Being female was related to scoring higher on the negative work-home spillover scale, as
was being married/living with a partner and being white. Respondents belonging to the
two lowest family income brackets were shown to have higher scores on the negative
spillover scale (compared to those with a family income of $100,000 or more), indicating
that those reporting higher family incomes also reported lower rates of spillover.” Having
a child at home was also associated with higher reported levels of home-work spillover
levels.

Some of these general spillover patterns appear to be generational: “Members of the
Silent/GI Generation [ages 65 and older] continued to trend towards lower spillover
scores compared to the Millennials.”

Interestingly, the use of Facebook at home to contact work colleagues was associated
with lower reported levels of work-home spillover. This may be because the content of
the message on Facebook may not be related to professional life necessarily, and
therefore Facebook may actually “provide a means to lessen work-related stresses and
contribute to less negative spillover.”

“In addition to what has already been suggested,” the researcher writes, “future research
should also explore the potential positive effects ICTs may have on work/home spillover. This
paper focuses solely on the impacts ICTs may have on negative spillover, but a body of
literature suggests that ICTs may also assist in alleviating work-home and home-work conflict …
and future investigations may continue to unfold the complex positive and negative
relationships technology may have with work/home life.”

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Tags: technology, Facebook, women and work, telecommunications

Writer: John Wihbey | April 5, 2013

Citation: Berkowsky, Ronald W. “When You Just Cannot Get Away,” Information,
Communication & Society, March 2013. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2013.772650.

http://journalistsresource.org/author/john-wihbey

10/26/15, 6:07 PMThe Flight From Conversation – The New York Times

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SundayReview | OPINION

The Flight From Conversation
SHERRY TURKLE APRIL 21, 2012

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And
yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives
text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes
and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it
involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s
hard, but it can be done.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and
talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in
lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful
that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.”
Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere,
connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to
move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over
where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of
one, loyal to our own party.

http://www.nytimes.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html#sundayreview

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Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what
interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from
one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t
stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He
says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself.
“I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I
should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost
wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a
conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation
show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the
campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each
of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch
screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young
associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones.
And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks
into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet
that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot
of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use
technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too
far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This
means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the
flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned
the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to

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connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves.
Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a
big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these
have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter
how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for
saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting
in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one
another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s
derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and
nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of
view.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we
communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the
volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get
these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications,
even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on
cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we
were nourish’d by.”

And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So
our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-
reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but
we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in
conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends
except connect.

As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with
less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people
muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school

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sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence
program instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more
in its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital
assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more
like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.

During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with
technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe
this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a
Twitter feed — each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why
— against all reason — so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to
care about us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots,
designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I
brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care
facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The
robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the
conversation. The woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants
advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to
computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused
conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind
of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day.
And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no
experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be
there for one another?

WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem
increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship
without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide
three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our
attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our

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new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a
device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant,
reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves
by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I
have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling;
I need to send a text.”

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in
our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather
ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t
experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts
to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is
true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t
teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first,
deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining
room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of
conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are
so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about
what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should
introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in
between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to
the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we
hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the
same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their
heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now

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they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends,
partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and the author, most recently, of
“Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 22, 2012, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the
headline: The Flight From Conversation.

© 2015 The New York Times Company

http://www.mit.edu/~sturkle/

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/copyright/copyright-notice.html

10/26/15, 6:07 PMIs Facebook Making Us Lonely? – The Atlantic

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T E C H N O L O G Y

Is Facebook M

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.

S T E P H E N M A R C H E | M A Y 2 0 1 2 I S S U E

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Also see:

Live Chat With Stephen Marche

Vickers’s web of connections had grown
broader but shallower, as has happened for
many of us. We are living in an isolation that

YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy 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. 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 Savcobwebs 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.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/live-chat-with-stephen-marche-about-his-cover-story-is-facebook-making-us-lonely/255695/

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The author will be online at 3 p.m.
Eastern time on Monday, April 16, to
answer readers’ questions. Click the
link above for details.

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

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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.

FACEBOOK 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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

WELL 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

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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

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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

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feel motivated.”

Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.

JOHN 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

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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

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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?

LONELINESS 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

L A T E S T V I D E OL A T E S T V I D E O

An Oscar-Nominated Short Film of John Lennon’s Ramblings

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatles fanatic snuck into Lennon’s hotel room with a tape recorder.

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/411655/john-lennons-ramblings/

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A B O U T T H E A U T H O RA B O U T T H E A U T H O R

STEPHEN MARCHE is a novelist and a contributing editor at Esquire.

http://www.theatlantic.com/author/stephen-marche/