Greetings, reader! This week in New Communication Technologies, we’ll be covering and discussing various aspects of Facebook and all of the trappings and tribulations the platform has gone through. Now, I’ve gone and watched these two videos, which are part of a 2-part series called The Facebook Dilemma, where it explores how Facebook’s goal of bringing people together has resulted in unforeseen and frequently hazardous outcomes, such as the global spread of misinformation, political meddling, hate speech, and violence.
The Facebook Dilemma, Part 1:
This episode chronicles Facebook’s evolution from a college-based business to a global giant, emphasizing its initial mission to democratize knowledge and connect communities. It contrasts this optimism with the platform’s unaddressed issues of rapid growth, data collection, and user engagement, which led to significant shortcomings, such as the spread of misinformation during the 2016 U.S. election. Internal warnings from employees were overlooked in the pursuit of growth, creating a sense of unease about the company’s trajectory.
The Facebook Dilemma, Part 2:
The second episode explores the negative consequences of Facebook’s greed, highlighting the Cambridge Analytica incident, where users’ data was misused for political profiling, and the platform’s role in spreading hate speech that incited ethnic conflicts, notably in Myanmar. It also addresses Facebook’s inadequate responses to algorithmic bias and content moderation issues, leading to public outcry and calls for regulation, culminating in a portrayal of the company’s significant decline. Truly, “how the mighty have fallen,” and what a fall it was!
After watching that documentary, the next task for this blog was to locate another video that either supports or refutes the points made in the documentary. I’ve been searching for something similar, but fortunately, I’m somewhat interested in this type of content, so it wasn’t too hard.
This video, titled A History of Facebook’s (& Meta’s) Decline, goes very much in line with the FRONTLINE documentary but also includes more aspects of Meta and recent issues/controversies that the company has gone under. As it does more updated info, it also takes a personal look at the creator’s own experience with initially finding joy with Facebook and the eventual falling out, both personally and with popular culture at large. This is an expansive and exhaustive look into this subject that’s very well researched. One aspect that really jumped out to me was that it includes a look into how they utilized the teenage population as guinea pigs with the acquisition and alteration of Instagram, as well as the heinous scandals both in and outside the company. It’s a really great video; I recommend those who are interested to give it a watch!
Next, this blog post takes me to a reading of these two articles.
Is Facebook making us lonely?
Facebook isn’t making us lonely.
Both of these articles come from the spring of 2012, so looking at it from the perspective of 10+ years later of social media was definitely interesting. Now, with the first article, it goes over all of the differing supportive factors, such as popular media, trends, and more, that contribute to the narrative that Facebook may be making us more lonely. It gets into detail about the increasing and unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation that the internet and Facebook have expedited in recent years, with flashy and extreme takes. Ties to movies, books, and how many people are actively on the internet and, subsequently, Facebook, lead to this narrative of an onslaught of loneliness spurned from the advancement of technology. This all makes for quite some sensationalist writing, but I’m trying to contend with not having someone else’s opinion cloud my vision, as I got most of the first article’s takes from the second one, as I was unable to fully read the first, as I didn’t have an account set up for The Atlantic in order to read it.
The second article, Facebook isn’t making us lonely, is fittingly a response to the first article, but it’s not trying to defend Facebook; rather, it’s a criticism of social media on the internet affecting the loneliness of people at large, with emphasis from professionals in the field on the fact that Facebook, therefore the internet, is a tool whose nature depends on how it’s used. This one I was able to fully read, and it has some criticisms and research-supported evidence to disprove the previous article. Articles like Stephen Marche’s article in The Atlantic that claim Americans are more alone than ever point to a level of alienation never seen before, especially when it comes to technology like Facebook. But there isn’t much evidence to support these assertions.
Although experts like John Cacioppo and others contest the idea of increased loneliness, citing conflicting evidence, Marche cites studies, including one from AARP, that suggest increased chronic loneliness. Leading sociologists, such as Claude Fischer, maintain that Americans’ social ties are stable, which contradicts the narrative of growing loneliness and isolation brought on by technological advancements. Marche uses inconsistent data to support his claim of social isolation. Yet, Marche first concurs with these claims after speaking with Cacioppo, saying that Facebook does not intrinsically cause loneliness, but he subsequently contends that it produces a “new isolation” that keeps users stuck in a vicious cycle of conceit and continual interaction, preventing true solitude. While acknowledging that disconnecting from technology is an option, the author of this article contends that making effective use of the Internet could improve comprehension of these problems.
How relevant are the contents of these articles today in light of how social media has evolved and changed? Please use some of your own experiences using Facebook and/or other social media sites.
Despite how extreme and outlandish that first article might’ve sounded at the time, at least in my perspective, since 2012 things have shifted and become a little more tuned towards that end of the spectrum, rather than what the latter article suggests. Granted, I say this as a relatively young person in 2025, but in my experience, I’ve had more of a mix of people who have either larger social circles or a few friends to those who are ‘chronically online.’ I guess you could say this is due to my inherently gregarious nature, but nevertheless, this should not discount the experiences and interactions I’ve had over social media. I believe that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, with both articles having some pros and cons to them. With this “new isolation” that Mache suggests coming from the second article, I tend to agree, as in the current day social media can absolutely have an effect on certain individuals who are essentially wasting their lives or completely viewing them through the lens of social media. I mean, some people are capable of posting updates or anything up to 20 times a day!
In my experience, a lot of this contributes to those who are more susceptible than others to spend more of their available free time online, but there’s more than this, too. Phones and social media have been manufactured to be addictive in nature, to fire your dopamine right in your brain, directly, with little effort. This then leads to ‘easy content,’ which allows the user to merely engage in something that they can just use 1 finger to interact with. Covid and the accessibility of social media combined with the advancement of tech is a considerable factor, as with Covid, for all intents and purposes, we were all essentially forced to be online for a substantial amount of time. Further and further political divide, anger, and rising discontent at large since then have only built. With all of these elements on the table, I think it is more than fair to wager that there’s more of an even split/healthy distribution of people who lie on the spectrum of isolation and loneliness. However, I believe that there’s a silver lining to this.
There still exist those who seek out companionship and true friendship with one another in the real world. I think that indeed weight remains with what Cacioppo is writing: “Surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” It just isn’t as flashy or article-worthy as claiming x is responsible for y. Real life is messy and unfair and can absolutely have its fair share of loneliness and isolation. But the thing that life can do better than Facebook is to give you something real and to give you joy, hope, and companionship and create genuine bonds. Now, I’m not saying that everyone should abandon all social media like the plague, but rather I’m stating that social media is a supplement, and in the end, with all of us being human beings at the end of the day, reality will continue to be real and will always have something to offer us, to give us companionship and connection; we just have to have the courage to reach out our hand and try.
Leave a Reply