When reading the “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” article by Stephen Marche, it really took me back to what we discussed in class this past Thursday on whether Facebook and social media overall is making us lonely. It is very interesting because Marche brought up some excellent points why we are becoming more lonely, and it’s difficult to disagree with him on a lot of his points simply because of the experiences I’ve been through personally. Marche repeatedly emphasizes that social media nowadays have made us lonelier than ever because we are not communicating face-to-face as often anymore compared to, say, 10 years ago. He uses all of these studies explaining all these answers about loneliness and whatnot and a lot of it fits the bill. Despite social media making everyone more lonely, the popular people are the ones that will benefit the most because they have the most contacts, whereas lonelier people will turn to social media to try and stay out of boredom. This takes me back to what my life was like a lot of times last academic year when I was still in a dorm, because my roommate, who was part of a frat, would often to go his frat house just because, and I remember checking social media the most when he was gone because I didn’t know anybody else on my floor and everyone else I knew were scattered across campus, or even off-campus. I would periodically contact people to see if they wanted to do something and sometimes it worked out, and sometimes it didn’t. But the problem was that I didn’t have a slew of contacts at my disposal if I wanted to do something, compared to other people who always had a different contact no matter the circumstance. What Marche said in his article, however, is very interesting because it connects to things that have happened to me personally.
The second article, “Facebook Isn’t Making Us Lonely,” by Eric Klinenberg didn’t strike me as much because his article is basically about him denying Marche’s claims and not giving Marche any counter-evidence to why Marche is wrong. Klinenberg’s argument just did not make sense to me because yes, while we are all becoming increasingly connected,the problem is that social media is making us more isolated, something Marche pointed out frequently. Like I mentioned in the first paragraph, the people who have more interpersonal friends are the only who benefit the most anyways because they are going to have more contacts than less-popular people. It really doesn’t matter what kind of social media platform we use because when we do use one, say, Facebook, we want to feel connected with one another which is why we post our own status, like a post, comment, or share something. We expect interaction of some sort because we want to feel attached with one another because that is what human nature is. Same thing for Snapchat, whether we post stuff on our stories or send a snap to somebody. The willingness to feel connected is what drives human behavior, so for example, if we send a snap to somebody and it either takes forever for them to respond or simply opens it and doesn’t snap back, it makes some people go a little crazy because they temporarily lost that connection, which makes us feel a little more lonely before we sent the snap.
So if I had one choice to decide whether social media is or isn’t making us more lonely, and not both, I’d say that social media is making us feel more lonely. While I do feel it’s a mix of both, I feel that someone who is less popular with a social media account is going to feel less lonely than someone who is less popular without a social media account simply because social media is a major component of how society is currently shaped.