social media is making us antisocial essay

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The Era of Antisocial Social Media

• Sara Wilson

Young people’s behaviors are changing. How will businesses adapt?

When you look at who is — and more importantly, who is not — driving the growth and popularity of social platforms, a key demographic appears to be somewhat in retreat: young people. They’re craving privacy, safety, and a respite from the throngs of people on social platforms (throngs that now usually include their parents), and gravitating toward more intimate destinations. The author has dubbed these “digital campfires.” She outlines three kinds of campfires, including the characteristics of each, as well as how brands are successfully reaching these audiences.

Social platforms are still reporting robust growth — yes, even Facebook — despite a growing chorus of opposition. Social conversation continues to shape everything from culture to the media cycle to our most intimate relationships . And we now spend more time than ever on our phones , with endless scrolling through our social feeds being a chief reason why.

• Sara Wilson   helps brands, publishers and high-profile individuals find, engage and grow devoted audiences across digital channels. As the founder of SW Projects , she has advised clients including Nike, Bumble, the New York Times, National Geographic, Sony Pictures Television, Bustle, Overheard, and others. Prior to SW Projects, Sara oversaw lifestyle partnerships at Facebook & Instagram. Sara is also the creator of The Digital Campfire Download, where she interviews the entrepreneurs behind the fastest-growing online communities today. You can follow her on Twitter @ wilsonspeaks  or on LinkedIn @ saraewilson .

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October 1, 2016

Social Technologies Are Making Us Less Social

For the first time in the history of our species, we are never alone and never bored. Have we lost something fundamental about being human?

By Mark Fischetti

Martin O'Neill

Chances are that you have a smartphone, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and a Facebook page and that you have found yourself ignoring a friend or family member who is in the same room as you because you are totally engrossed in your social technology. That technology means never having to feel alone or bored. Yet ironically, it can make us less attentive to the people closest to us and even make it hard for us to simply be with ourselves. Many of us are afraid to make this admission. “We're still in a romance with these technologies,” says Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We're like young lovers who are afraid that talking about it will spoil it.” Turkle has interviewed, at length, hundreds of individuals of all ages about their interactions with smartphones, tablets, social media, avatars and robots. Unlike previous disruptive innovations such as the printing press or television, the latest “always on, always on you” technology, she says, threatens to undermine some basic human strengths that we need to thrive. In the conversation that follows, which has been edited for space, Turkle explains her concerns, as well as her cautious optimism that the youngest among us could actually resolve the challenges.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:

What concerns you most about our constant interaction with our social technologies? TURKLE: One primary change I see is that people have a tremendous lack of tolerance for being alone. I do some of my fieldwork at stop signs, at checkout lines at supermarkets. Give people even a second, and they're doing something with their phone. Every bit of research says people's capacity to be alone is disappearing. What can happen is that you lose that moment to have a daydream or to cast an eye inward. Instead you look to the outside.

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Is that an issue for individuals of all ages? Yes, but children especially need solitude. Solitude is the precondition for having a conversation with yourself. This capacity to be with yourself and discover yourself is the bedrock of development. But now, from the youngest age—even two, or three, or four—children are given technology that removes solitude by giving them something externally distracting. That makes it harder, ironically, to form true relationships.

Maybe people just don't want to be bored. People talk about never needing to have a lull. As soon as it occurs, they look at the phone; they get anxious. They haven't learned to have conversations or relationships, which involve lulls.

Are we valuing relationships less, then? People start to view other people in part as objects. Imagine two people on a date. “Hey, I have an idea. Instead of our just looking at each other face-to-face, why don't we each wear Google Glass, so if things get a little dull, I can just catch up on my e-mail? And you won't know.” This disrupts the family, too. When Boring Auntie starts to talk at the family dinner table, her little niece pulls out her phone and goes on Facebook. All of a sudden her world is populated with snowball fights and ballerinas. And dinner is destroyed. Dinner used to be the utopian ideal of the American family having a canonical three-generation gathering.

What about people who take their phones to bed? They're asleep, so why would they feel alone? I have interviewed enough middle school and high school kids: “So tell me, do you answer your texts in the middle of the night?” “Oh, yeah.” I call it “I share, therefore I am,” as a style of being.

If you're sharing in the middle of the night and responsive to people in the middle of the night, you're in a different zone. And all these people feel responsible to respond. The expectation is constant access. Everyone is ready to call in the advice and the consent of their peers. I did a case study of a young woman who has 2,000 followers on Instagram. She'll ask about a problem at 9:00 at night, and at 2:00 in the morning she's getting responses, and she's awake to get those responses. This is 2:00 in the morning for a lot of kids.

Where does this lead for someone who lives that way? If you don't call a halt to it, I think you don't fully develop a sense of an autonomous self. You're not able to be in personal relationships, business relationships, because you don't feel fully competent to handle major things on your own. You run into trouble if you're putting everything up, ultimately, for a vote.

You're crowdsourcing your life. You're crowdsourcing major decisions. I hope it's likely, however, that a person reaches a point where they're on a job—they're not twentysomething, they're thirtysomething—and this starts to become less comfortable, and they develop emotional skills that they really haven't worked on.

What about our interactions with automated personalities and robots? When we started looking at this in the 1970s, people took the position that even if simulated thinking might be thinking, simulated feeling was not feeling. Simulated love was never love. But that's gone away. People tell me that if Siri [the iPhone voice] could fool them a little better, they'd be happy to talk to Siri.

Isn't that like the movie Her? Absolutely. The current position seems to be that if there's a robot that could fool me into thinking that it understands me, I'm good to have it as a companion. This is a significant evolution in what we ask for in our interactions, even on intimate matters. I see it in kids. I see it in grown-ups. The new robots are designed to make you feel as though you're understood. Yet nobody is pretending that any of them understands anything.

What line does that cross—that there's no empathy? There's no authentic exchange. You're saying empathy is not important to the feeling of being understood. And yet I interviewed a woman who said to me that she's okay with a robot boyfriend. She wants one of these sophisticated Japanese robots. I looked at her and said, “You know that it doesn't understand you.” She said, “Look, I just want civility in the house. I just want something that will make me feel not alone.”

People are also good with a robot that could stand in as a companion for an older person. But I take a moral position here because older people deserve to tell the story of their life to someone who understands what a life is. They've lost spouses; they've lost children. We're suggesting they tell the story of their life to something that has no idea what a life is or what a loss is.

It's crucial to understand that this changing interaction is not just a story about technology. It's a story about how we are evolving when we're faced with something passive. I hope we're going to look closer at people's willingness to project humanity onto a robot and to accept a facade of empathy as the real thing because I think that such interactions are a dead end. We want more from technology and less from each other? Really?

Do avatars and virtual reality present the same issues? In these cases, we are moving from life to the mix of your real life and your virtual life. One young man put it very succinctly: “Real life is just one window, and it's not necessarily my best one.” People forgot about virtual reality for a while, but the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook raised it again—Mark Zuckerberg's fantasy that you will meet up with your friends in a virtual world where everybody looks like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, you live in a beautiful home, and you present only what you want to present. We're evolving toward thinking of that as a utopian image.

But skeptics say your avatar is not different from the real you. Well, we do perform all the time. I'm trying to do my best Sherry Turkle right now. But it's a little different from me hanging out in my pajamas. What's different with an avatar or on Facebook is that you get to edit. A woman posts a photo of herself and then works on the color and background and lighting. Why? Because she wants it a certain way. We've never before been able to have it the way we wanted it. And now we can. People love that.

I asked an 18-year-old man, “What's wrong with conversation?” He said, “It takes place in real time. You can't control what you're going to say.” It was profound. That's also why a lot of people like to do their dealings on e-mail—it's not just the time shifting; it's that you basically can get it right.

One reason for the rise of humans is that functioning in groups gives each member a better chance to succeed. Will the move toward living online undermine those benefits? Oh, this is the question before us. Are we undermining, or are we enhancing our competitive advantage? A lot of my colleagues would say we're enhancing it. The Internet is giving us new ways of getting together, forming alliances. But I think we are at a point of inflection. While we were infatuated with the virtual, we dropped the ball on where we actually live. We need to balance how compelling the virtual is with the realities that we live in our bodies and on this planet. It is so easy for us to look the other way. Are we going to get out there and make our real communities what they should be?

Your critics say there's nothing to worry about because this “new technology” situation is not really new. We went through this with television—you know, TV is there to watch your kids so you don't have to. First of all, television can be a group exercise. I grew up in a family that sat around a TV and watched it together, fought about what was on the TV together, commented on it together. But when everybody watches their own show in their own room, so to speak, that stops. Technology that is always on and always on you—that is a quantum leap. I agree that there have been quantum leaps before: the book. The difference with “always on,” however, is that I really don't have a choice.

You mean, you could turn off the TV and still function. I cannot live my professional life or my personal life without my phone or my e-mail. My students can't even obtain their syllabus without it. We don't have an opt-out option from a world with this technology. The question is, How are we going to live a more meaningful life with something that is always on and always on you? And wait until it's in your ear, in your jacket, in your glasses.

So how do we resolve that? It's going to develop as some sort of common practice. I think companies will get involved, realizing that it actually isn't good for people to be constantly connected. Our etiquette will get involved; today if I get a message and don't get back to people in 24 hours, they're worried about me, or they're mad that I haven't replied. Why? I think we will change our expectation of having constant access.

Any suggestions for how we can get started? One argument I make is that there should be sacred spaces: the family dinner table, the car. Make these the places for conversation because conversation is the antidote to a lot of the issues I'm describing. If you're talking to your kids, if you're talking to your family, if you're talking to a community, these negative effects don't arise as much.

And we should be talking more about the technologies? My message is not antitechnology. It's pro conversation and pro the human spirit. It's really about calling into questions our dominant culture of more, better, faster. We need to assert what we need for our own thinking, for our own development, and for our relationships with our children, with our communities, with our intimate partners. As for the robots, I'm hoping that people will realize that what we're really disappointed in is ourselves. It's so upsetting to me. We're basically saying that we're not offering one another the conversation and the companionship. That, really, is the justification for talking to a robot that you know doesn't understand a word you're saying. We are letting each other down. It's not about the robots. It's about us.

So who is going to stop this train we are on? The most optimistic thing I see is the young people who have grown up with this technology but aren't smitten by it, who are willing to say, “Hold on a second.” They see the ways in which it's undermined life at school and life with their parents. This is where I'm guardedly hopeful.

I have so many examples of children who will be talking with their parents; something will come up, and the parent will go online to search, and the kid will say, “Daddy, stop Googling. I just want to talk to you.” When I go to the city park, I see kids go to the top of the jungle gym and call out, “Mommy, Mommy!” and they're being ignored. They object to being ignored when they're five, eight or nine. But when I interview these kids when they're 13, 14 or 15, they become reflective. They say, “I'm not going to bring up my children the way I'm being brought up.” They're going to have rules, like no phones at dinner.

I also see evidence that dealing with some of this technology is feeling to them like work—the whole notion that you have to constantly keep up your Facebook profile. So I think there's every possibility that the children will lead us. They see the costs. They think, “I don't have to give up this technology, but maybe I could be a little smarter about it.”

Mark Fischetti has been a senior editor at Scientific American for 17 years and has covered sustainability issues, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits feature articles, commentaries and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in those formats. He edits History, the magazine's department looking at science advances throughout time. He was founding managing editor of two spinoff magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0 . His 2001 freelance article for the magazine, " Drowning New Orleans ," predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body after You Die? , has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum Magazine and of Family Business Magazine . He has a physics degree and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, which celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on the Earth and space sciences. He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations. Follow Fischetti on X (formerly Twitter) @markfischetti

Social Media Broke Slang. Now We All Speak Phone.

The irony: Online is where we most need the identity cues that idiosyncratic language used to provide.

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It was on the social-media platform some call X that I first encountered the slang term tea , an expression that originated in Black drag culture to mean “ gossip ” or “secret biographical information”—as in, “She said she didn’t get fillers, but her boyfriend spilled the tea.” Tea was common parlance on Twitter by at least the Trump administration. At some point in the past year, however, people started saying body tea, a noun phrase meaning “physical hotness.” This usage was apparently derived from a misreading of the influencer Queen Opp’s remark : “Her body tea, she’s super thick, she’s super pretty.” Queen Opp elided the verb to be from a declarative clause, which viewers seem to have misinterpreted, taking “her body [is] tea” to mean “[she has] body tea.” Body tea as a noun has since become so popular that it threatens to eclipse the original usage. An expression that once had a narrow meaning within a specific subculture has drifted toward meaning “good”—a flattening that is the final destination of all slang terms that spread too far too fast.

As a middle-aged heterosexual, I shouldn’t know any of this stuff. While I think of myself as cool and relevant, objectively there is no reason I should understand any slang term that originated after the final season of Workaholics . But I live under unnatural conditions—conditions dictated by social media and its delivery system, the smartphone. Like most internet users with access to X, Instagram, TikTok, and so forth, I routinely spend two to 22 hours a day competing in a metered popularity contest that rewards, among other things, whoever can deviate the furthest from standard English and still be understood. If the slang that emerges from these deviations excludes anyone, it should exclude me. And yet I comprehend it with terrifying clarity.

Because social media gives me access to conversations among people of all ages, from every place and subculture, I am exposed to a virtual fire hose of slang. The discourse that produces new slang is not only publicly available online, but also amplified based on its ability to attract attention from outside its original context. We all stand before this fire hose now, and some of it gets in our mouths. The situation has created a language crisis, in which Americans of all types and backgrounds use expressions of every provenance, destroying the power of slang to perform its basic function: to signal membership in a group.

The incentives imposed by social media to develop and use slang are, of course, not new. Middle schools, skate parks, barracks, gay bars, locker rooms, and various music scenes have operated on the slang-for-esteem model for generations. But these milieus differ from social media in one crucial way: The wrong people cannot get in. In real life, I do not learn how teenagers talk, because whenever I drift by, they fall silent and glare at me. On social media, there is no such exclusion. Thirty-five-year-olds hear the slang of teenagers, college students are privy to the language of the urban underclass, and advertising consultants learn how to talk like self-diagnosed anxiety shut-ins. As a result, how someone talks is no longer a reliable indicator of where they’re coming from. The irony is that social media—the disembodied online spaces where what we post becomes the entirety of who we are—is where we most need the identity cues that slang used to provide.

These cues are an essential part of life offline, if only at a subconscious level. If I’m in a crowd and someone addresses us collectively, I immediately start assessing that person’s background and orientation based on whether they say “ladies and gentlemen,” “you guys,” or “y’all.” These assessments depend on a whole mess of associations and shifting cultural currents of which I am imperfectly but also instinctively aware—associations that are felt more than considered but nonetheless specific and up-to-date.

Read: The most fun way to learn a language

The valence of any given expression is constantly changing—for instance, the dramatic shift since 2008 in what kind of person says “folks.” Folks was a word used almost exclusively by older rural people until the Obama administration, when the president used it relentlessly . Folks subsequently became so popular with politicians, HR supervisors, and others who professionally reassure the hoi polloi that it is now, perversely, one of the strongest signs of membership in the professional managerial class. When Obama said “folks,” he sent the message that, although he was a graduate of Harvard Law School, a senator, and the kind of hyper-ambitious professional who becomes a candidate for president, he was also a salt-of-the-earth type who spoke the language of farmers and Dolly Parton. He was folksy .

One term for this kind of implied message is exformation . The word has different definitions in different fields, but we will define it for our purposes as David Foster Wallace did in a July 1998 essay for Harper’s Magazine : as information conveyed about the speaker that is not explicit in the content of the speech.

Exformation communicated by slang is a way for strangers to efficiently understand whom they are talking with and where they’re from, based on whether they use double negatives or say “man” versus “bro,” “that rules” versus “that owns,” “pot” versus “weed,” “cool” versus “lit.” Exformation is also a way to announce your identification with other people. When I see old friends from whom I have been separated by time and distance greater than I imagined I could bear, and I say, “What’s up, sluts?,” I could be taken to mean, in the literal sense, that I am greeting them and condemning their past sexual behavior. But at the level of exformation, I am conveying a whole parcel of unspoken ideas about our relationship, our shared cultural consumption , and my perspective on it. The basic premise of exformation is that there’s what you say and there’s how you say it, and they are in scope and function as the ground is to the sky.

Read: Why AI doesn’t get slang

Social media, however, has standardized our language to the point that exformation has become endangered. For the past 10 years, the English language’s wealth of previously exformative, subcultural slang has dispersed into a single, universal argot that is simply Phone. Hence the destruction of tea as a useful expression. It used to be a fun word that implied knowledge of a whole social realm to which most of us are not privy, and then it became a built-in Twitter GIF that told you only that the person using it knew what the GIF button did. Now anyone who uses tea in conversation might give you information—but exformatively, all they’re telling you about themselves is that they’ve been racking up a lot of screen time.

In the absence of distinctive subcultural expressions, social media has become full of empty slang. The locution the way , used at the beginning of a declarative statement—for example, “the way I never thought I would be 46”—makes that statement less formal and therefore less intense but otherwise adds no informative or exformative meaning. The comparably empty “ It’s giving [noun/adjective]” at least turns a sentence fragment into a complete thought—allowing me to respond to a photo of the Tesla Cybertruck with “It’s giving DeLorean” instead of simply blurting out “DeLorean!” like a caveman—but in a potentially insidious way that encourages us to think in vague, unspecified connections, at the level of vibes .

Read: The origin of vibes

Vibes , it seems to me, is the worst offender in the category of slang expressions that help us think less instead of more, a cliché that releases the pressure on language and keeps vaporous thoughts from coalescing into anything solid at all. Everyone online says “vibes” now —college students and corporate bureaucrats and The New York Times (and The Atlantic !) alike.

This mass outbreak of exformation-free slang is a problem because it deprives people of a previously reliable way to know whom they’re talking with and how to treat them. If I hear someone make a remark about the first Velvet Underground album with which I strongly disagree, I am more likely to respond kindly if I know they come from a background different from my own. If a stranger on Twitter says that Nico had pitch problems, I am much more likely to tear into them if they speak the way I do, because I assume they have the cultural experiences, education, and resources that brought me to my own extremely correct opinions. When everyone talks like me, I make the mistake of believing that everyone is like me—and therefore falls into the category of people whom I cut the least slack.

The slangs that I grew up with—the skater expressions I adopted even though I never ollied , the Spanish lingo we learned from Blood In, Blood Out and were just worldly enough to realize we shouldn’t use, the East Coast and SoCal expressions that kept new kids at our school from successfully buying drugs—all these clues I spent years learning to interpret have burned up in the wildfire spread of Phone. The crisis in American slang is that we grasp what everyone is saying so well that we think we know one another, when in fact we understand less and less.

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Social Media is Making Us Unsocial

Is social media making you unhappy? The answer is not so simple

Senior Lecturer, School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Adelaide

Professor of Data Science, University of Adelaide

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Melissa Humphries receives funding from the NIH and the Department of Defence.

Lewis Mitchell receives funding from the Australian Research Council, NHMRC, and Department of Defence.

University of Adelaide provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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You may have seen headlines that link social media to sadness and depression. Social media use goes up, happiness goes down. But recent studies suggest those findings might not be so straightforward.

Although it is true that people’s feelings of envy and depression are linked to high social media use, there is evidence to suggest social media use may not be causing that relationship. Instead, your mindset may be the biggest thing affecting how social media connects to your wellbeing.

People who feel they are able to use social media, rather than social media “using them”, tend to gain more benefits from their online interactions.

Why do people use social media?

Social media covers a broad range of platforms: social networking, discussion forums, bookmarking and sharing content, disseminating news, exchanging media like photos and videos, and microblogging. These appeal to a wide range of users, from individuals of all ages through to massive businesses.

For some, social media is a way to connect with people we may not otherwise see. In the United States, 39% of people say they are friends with people they only interact with online .

For older people, this is especially important for increasing feelings of connectedness and wellbeing. Interestingly though, for older people, social media contact with family does not increase happiness . Meanwhile, younger adults report increased happiness when they have more social media contact with family members.

Teens, in particular, find social media most useful for deepening connections and building their social networks .

With social media clearly playing such an important role in society, many researchers have tried to figure out: does it make us happier or not?

Does social media make us happier?

Studies have taken a variety of approaches, including asking people directly through surveys or looking at the content people post and seeing how positive or negative it is.

One survey study from 2023 showed that as individuals’ social media use increased, life satisfaction and happiness decreased . Another found that less time on social media was related to increases in work satisfaction, work engagement and positive mental health – so improved mental health and motivation at work.

Comparing yourself to others on social media is connected to feelings of envy and depression. However, there is evidence to suggest depression is the predictor, rather than the outcome, of both social comparison and envy.

All this shows the way you feel about social media matters . People who see themselves using social media rather than “being used” by it, tend to gain benefits from social media and not experience the harms.

Interviews with young people (15–24 years) using social media suggest that positive mental health among that age group was influenced by three features :

• connection with friends and their global community
• engagement with social media content
• the value of social media as an outlet for expression.

There are also studies that look at the emotions expressed by more frequent social media users.

The so-called “ happiness paradox ” shows that most people think their friends on social media appear happier than themselves. This is a seeming impossibility that arises because of the mathematical properties of how friendship networks work on social media.

In one of our studies, Twitter content with recorded locations showed residents of cities in the United States that tweeted more tended to express less happiness .

On the other hand, in Instagram direct messages, happiness has been found to be four times more prevalent than sadness .

How does internet use in general affect our wellbeing?

Some of the factors associated with decreased mental health are not aligned with social media use alone.

One recent study shows that the path to decreased wellbeing is, at least partially, connected to digital media use overall (rather than social media use specifically). This can be due to sleep disruption, reduced face-to-face social interaction or physical activity, social comparison, and cyberbullying. None of these exist for social media alone.

However, social media platforms are known to be driven by recommendation algorithms that may send us down “rabbit holes” of the same type of (increasingly extreme) content. This can lead to a distorted view of the world and our place in it. The important point here is to maintain a diverse and balanced information diet online.

Interestingly, interacting on social media is not the only thing affecting our mental state. Rainfall influnces the emotional content of social media posts of both the user experiencing rain, and parts of their extended network (even if they don’t experience rain!).

This suggests that how we feel is influenced by the emotions in the posts we see. The good news is that happy posts are the most influential, with each happy post encouraging close to two additional happy updates from a user’s friends.

The secret to online happiness therefore may not be to “delete your account” entirely (which, as we have found , may not even be effective), but to be mindful about what you consume online. And if you feel like social media is starting to use you, it might be time to change it up a bit.

• Social media
• Mental health
• Social media addiction
• Social media use
• Teens and social media

Lecturer in Indigenous Health (Identified)

Lecturer in Visual Art

PhD Scholarship

Senior Lecturer, HRM or People Analytics

Centre Director, Transformative Media Technologies

Is Social Media Making Us Less Social?

Written by Steve Rose

Identity, purpose, and belonging, 15 comments(s).

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In an age where we are becoming more connected through social media every day, it sometimes feels like we are also becoming less social.

Why go through all of the inconvenience of meeting up in person when you can simply catch up online?

Within the last decade, technology has profoundly shifted the nature of human communication.

Some say we are “hyper-social,” always connected and communicating with multiple people at the same time.  Others would say we have become “anti-social,” glued to our devices, and lacking interpersonal skills.  So which is it?

Is social media making us less social?

Social Media is making us less social when used to compare oneself to others, contributing to higher levels of loneliness and lower levels of well-being among frequent users. It can be social when used to connect with others.

Let’s take a look at the research.

Also, if you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, you can check out my  resource page  for suggestions on how to find help.

Social Media Contributes to Social Isolation

The first study looking at this phenomenon was published in 1998, around the time when many people were starting to use the internet.

The researchers followed 169 people during the first two years of their internet use to determine if this new technology made them more social or less social, finding:

“…greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants’ communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness.”

This was seen as quite the paradox, given that the individuals were using the internet extensively as a communication technology.

A 2004 study comparing internet use to face-to-face interaction found a similar conclusion, stating:

…the Internet can decrease social well-being, even though it is often used as a communication tool.

Has anything changed since then?

Ten years later, a 2014 study  on college students suffering from internet addiction found:

Results show that excessive and unhealthy Internet use would increase feelings of loneliness over time…[.] This study also found that online social contacts with friends and family were not an effective alternative for offline social interactions in reducing feelings of loneliness.

In her recent book,  iGen , Jean Twenge writes about the generation born after 1994, finding high rates of mental health issues and isolation:

“A stunning 31% more 8th and 10th graders felt lonely in 2015 than in 2011, along with 22% more 12th graders”…[.] All in all, iGen’ers are increasingly disconnected from human relationships.

She argues the increasing level of screen-time and decreasing degree of in-person interaction leaves igen lacking social skills:

“In the next decade we may see more young people who know just the right emoji for a situation—but not the right facial expression.”

A 2016 study comments on this generational phenomenon, stating:

It is surprising then that, in spite of this enhanced interconnectivity, young adults may be lonelier than other age groups, and that the current generation may be the loneliest ever.

The correlation between internet use and isolation is fairly established in the literature. But let’s not paint the whole internet with the same brush.

A 2014 study  highlights the psychological costs and benefits derived from social media use, stating:

…online tools create a paradox for social connectedness. On one hand, they elevate the ease in which individuals may form and create online groups and communities, but on the other, they can create a source of alienation and ostracism.

It turns out the answer may be a bit more complicated.

Let’s take a look at the specific factors that make the difference.

Social Media Can Be Social (If used to connect)

A 2016 study with the apt subtitle, “Why an Instagram picture may be worth more than a thousand Twitter words,” finds that image-based social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat may be able to decrease loneliness because of the higher levels of intimacy they provide.

Another 2016 study , specifically looking at Instagram use, found that it isn’t the platform that matters. It is the way the platform is used that matters.

The researchers studied Instagram use among 208 undergraduate students, finding there was one thing that made all the difference: “the social comparison orientation.”

What is social comparison orientation?

It’s when you compare yourself to others on social media. For example, you may find yourself passively scanning through an endless feed of finely curated photos, wishing you had a different body, a different job, a different  life !

It’s the sense that everyone has it better than you, and that you’re missing out on all of the best events, vacations, and products.

Students who rated high on social comparison orientation were more likely to widely broadcast their posts in an attempt to gain status. Students who rated low were more likely to use the platform to connect with others meaningfully.

A 2008 study on internet use among older adults supports this distinction, finding:

…greater use of the Internet as a communication tool was associated with a lower level of social loneliness. In contrast, greater use of the Internet to find new people was associated with a higher level of emotional loneliness.

Using the internet as a communication tool can decrease loneliness.

Experimental evidence in a 2004 study , highlights this by measuring a person’s level of loneliness throughout multiple intervals as they engage in an online chat. They concluded:

Internet use was found to decrease loneliness and depression significantly, while perceived social support and self-esteem increased significantly.

Although chatting online can decrease loneliness, what about using social media platforms to post status updates?

A 2012 study  conducted an experiment to determine if posting a Facebook status increases or decreases loneliness. Yes, this is an actual experiment.

The researchers told one group of participants to increase their number of status updates for one week. They didn’t give any instructions to a second control group. Results revealed:

(1) that the experimentally induced increase in status updating activity reduced loneliness, (2) that the decrease in loneliness was due to participants feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis, and (3) that the effect of posting on loneliness was independent of direct social feedback (i.e., responses) by friends.  

These results may seem to contradict the previous finding that social media broadcasting is correlated with increased loneliness, but there is a crucial difference: the social comparison orientation.

In this experiment, the researchers did not differentiate between users who had high or low levels of social comparison. The users in the group being told to update their status more frequently were not told to scan their news feeds more often, nor was their social media use manipulated to alter their level of social comparison.

So what is the key lesson here?

Using social media in a way that connects us with others can make us less lonely and more social.

Unfortunately, as social media use increases, we are becoming lonelier.

This trend suggests we may not be using social media in the most social ways, comparing ourselves to others. In addition, we may be sacrificing in-person interaction for the convenience of social media interaction. Both of these factors increase the likelihood of experiencing social isolation.

If you are interested in reading more on the psychology of social media, you can check out my comprehensive post on the topic here: Why We Are Addicted To Social Media: The Psychology of Likes .

In that article, I go deep into the research on what keeps our brains hooked on social media likes and how you can use social media in a healthier way.

Fascinated by ideas? Check out my podcast:

Struggling with an addiction.

If you’re struggling with an addiction, it can be difficult to stop. Gaining short-term relief, at a long-term cost, you may start to wonder if it’s even worth it anymore. If you’re looking to make some changes, feel free to reach out. I offer individual addiction counselling to clients in the US and Canada. If you’re interested in learning more, you can send me a message here .

Other Mental Health Resources

If you are struggling with other mental health issues or are  looking for a specialist near you, use the Psychology Today therapist directory  here to find a practitioner who specializes in your area of concern.

If you require a lower-cost option, you can check out BetterHelp.com . It is one of the most flexible forms of online counseling.  Their main benefit is lower costs, high accessibility through their mobile app, and the ability to switch counselors quickly and easily, until you find the right fit.

*As an affiliate partner with Better Help, I receive a referral fee if you purchase products or services through the links provided.

As always, it is important to be critical when seeking help, since the quality of counselors are not consistent. If you are not feeling supported, it may be helpful to seek out another practitioner. I wrote an article on things to consider here .

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15 Comments

that’s just it, people often mistake being connected on a more personal level with the total number of “Friends” they have on FB or MySpace or whatever OTHER forms of social networking, and they often neglect to realize, that face-to-face interaction is what makes these connections between people more intimate…

Exactly. Social media can supplement your social life if used to connect, but can’t be a substitute for it. Thanks for the comment! Great to connect with you again. It has been a while since I’ve posted.

Yeah but now, modern day people tend to use social media as their only FORM of connection, it’s like if you don’t exist on FB or other forms of social netowrking sites, you practctically, don’t exist at all!

With the trend toward increasing loneliness, it would for sure suggest social media is replacing in-person interaction.

one of the damning statistics on the recent programme Pllanet Children was 97% of primary school children were taken to school by an adult. They spend less time outside than those in prison. Our kids are getting fatter. They live in a bubble and social media swells that bubble and the vision of themselves becomes increasingly distorted. My grandkid loves phones because mum and dad always have their noses in their phones. The grandkid isn’t content with a kid-on phone. She wants the real one, and she’s just over a year old. We create our own hell, but our kids jump in with both feet. Why shouldn’t they? Mum and dad do it and it’s vastly entertaining. Social media swallows time. Why am I adding to it here? God knows.

Thanks for sharing this fact and your personal experience! I think you might be interested in this book on the subject of bubble wrapped children: Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)

Thanks for raising this issue, Steve. I’ve tried, without success, to arrange a lunch-meet with a dear friend–just half-hour away by bus–who has fallen victim to FB’s false promise of connection. Since I’ve long escaped from FB-addiction, I no longer know how she’s doing.

Glad to see you’ve been able to gain a sense of control! I hope your friend is well and wish her all the best.

In a restaurant, I went to a couple both staring deeply and silently at their phones and said, “That’s true love.” They laughed.

lol! Nice one!

Not up on the research, but it is fascinating. Might we be getting the correlation confused? Could it be that people who are more lonely are more likely to spend time on social media in search of connection? Is this controlled in the research?

From the research I’ve seen so far, it seems that social anxiety is the confounding variable between loneliness and increased social media use. Also, Jean Twange looks at this question in her book igen and finds that the research supports the hypothesis that social media use leads to increased loneliness. A couple of experiments I cited here use a control and don’t support that hypothesis, but they are fairly limited because they only look at narrow forms of social media use like status updates or chatting with an anonymous person.

Correctly said.

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How Social Media Makes Us Unsocial: Allison Graham (Transcript)

• June 11, 2020 7:47 am September 25, 2023 4:21 am
• by Pangambam S

Here is the transcript and summary of Social Media historian Allison Graham’s talk:  How Social Media Makes Us Unsocial at TEDxSMU conference. In this talk, she shares the funny and revealing insights of a life lived online and how social media is used to connect and disconnect us.

Best quote from this talk: 

“I think we would all live life better if we had hands to hold rather than keys to click.”

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT: 

Allison Graham – Social Media historian

Hi! Thank you very much.

I’d like to start out by asking everyone to power down their devices during my talk. And for those of you that don’t know the power buttons, it’s either on the top or on the side of your phone.

I’d also like to thank the guys from state.com for permission to use this video.

[Video clip]

“I want to post about how great this coffee is, but I can’t think of a funny way to say it.”

“This post is like a page long. How do I shorten this?”

“Just take out all the vowels.” [Still be the other page]

“Seriously!”

“Hey guys, you on Twitter? Follow me.”

“Sometimes I want to move to another country where I won’t have to deal with this stuff.”

(in foreign language) “SHHH.. I am working on a Tweet!” “Does this seem too much like I’m bragging?”

“Hashtag I quit. Just kidding.”

“Hashtag multitasking!”

“Hashtag squirmwork!”

“Hashtag road trip dude” “Not while you’re driving, man”

“Hashtag Yolo”

“Is anybody even gonna read this?”

“Basti!” “Copy friends?” “Unsubscribe” “Mini-bagels” xxxx

“What’s up Facebook!”

“How are my new shoes?”

“I love coffee!”

“We are doing virals”

“Driving selfie”

“Desert” “Food world” “Nobody cares”

“I’d all of you”

“Dude! I made the popular page.”

[Video clip concludes]

So I want to talk about three things tonight:

• How social media is disconnecting us.
• What’s happening now , and
• How we can do better.

Gallup took a poll in 2001 and every average American said that they had ten really close friends. VIEW FULL TRANSCRIPT The same poll this year said we had two.

So what happened? Where did everybody go? And I think we know where.

I think we’ve all seen this by now. Maybe even been a little guilty of it ourselves. I see families like this out to dinner all the time, and it drives me nuts. And I see couples on dates clearly together, but on their cell phones.

It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.

But to me what does this say when we are together?

To me it says that there’s someone, anyone on the other end of the screen that’s way more important than you, who’s right in front of my face.

There’s a study by Mary Meeker that says: We touch our phones or check our phones 150 times a day . And we upload 1.8 billion pictures to Facebook . That’s a little over a sixth of the population a day for pictures.

Remember when the Internet was new? Those of us that do. That was really, actually only about 25 years ago, if you can imagine.

I remember, when we had pagers, times seemed a little simpler back then. You’d get the beep. You may return the call, you may not return the call.

Or when we had answer machines, you could always say that you weren’t home. Now we have a list of all these excuses that may or may not work.

But it seems like the more we talk about how technology divides us, the more we demand from it. And I think that’s a huge risk that we’re running in our society today.

We have this shortened vocabulary now. It’s all about the texting. Even my mom! She says, ‘Just text me!’ And she’s a little bit older. I won’t say her age because she’ll see this later.

• OMG – O h my goodness
• LOL – Laugh out loud
• WTF – Why the face

So when we abbreviate our vocabulary what we risk is losing the nuances, subtleties and intimate parts of our personalities that make up our very rich American vocabulary. And with that shortening, we lose and run the risk of not being able to fully express ourselves and communicate, as we move forward.

And that losing our vocabulary equals a potential loss of being able to express ourselves.

How many times does anybody look in horror when their cell phone rings with the personal call? A whole conversation starts happening in your head, when it rings.

‘ Tiffany! Why is Tiffany calling? What does Tiffany want? Why is she calling me?’

And then you have that last ringtone moment where you know you have to pick up that phone or let it go to a voicemail. You may or may not check. ‘Hey Tiffany, what’s up?’ The whole time thinking she could have completely texted this whole message to me.

If I asked everybody in here if they could take their phone, set it down and walk away for an hour – could you do it? An immediate sense of panic comes over us.

We will turn the car around, even if we are halfway to our destination, just to go back and get our cell phones.

I had a Blackberry which I adored and I kept it for a really long time. But you guys remember when we had BlackBerry’s, don’t you? What did we call them back then? That’s right ‘ crack berries ’!

So it’s no surprise where we’ve landed ourselves now.

So I took my Blackberry into the Apple store when everybody else had their Apple phone, and the transition was more than I could bear. Experiencing phone shame!

And I went in and of course it was completely jam-packed at the Apple store. And this cute kid comes up to me and he’s like, ‘May I help you!’

And I said, ‘Yes, you can. I would like a phone that could do this!’

So I took my Blackberry and I threw it on the ground! But pop pop pop…. it goes all the way across the store. Everybody just stops in the store! Gasps!

And I walk over and I pick it up and I said, ‘See the screens fully intact. And it still works!’

And he just looked, not missing a beat, and he said, ‘We don’t have a phone that can do that.’

A new study out by the Cohen’s Children Medical Center in New Hyde Park. Their study says: ‘This year that texting while driving is now the number one cause of death for teens. More than drinking and driving!’

So what this means is…. There’s a lot of drunks on the road.

I was speaking to some high school students and of course you know they’re always willing to make some sort of bargain. And they raise their hand and they said, ‘Well, what if you’re at a stop sign? Or what if you’re at a stoplight?’

And I said, my message was, ‘I don’t think there’s really anything that can’t wait until we get to our destination. And don’t forget if you send that text at the stop sign, they’re probably going to text you back while you’re driving. So maybe not the best idea.’

And I’ll give you an example. If you’re driving 55 miles an hour and you look down at your phone for five seconds, you’ve just now driven the length of an entire football field completely blind .

And it’s not just our kids. It’s us as well. We are constantly at work. Constantly connected and constantly distracted. Everyone of us thinks of some sort of extreme vacation we need to go on, where we may say to our bosses, ‘You know, I’m going to go on a very extreme vacation. There’s just absolutely no way I can return anything during the day.’

But you’re still expected to go back to the hotel and return your work emails.

So if we as adults are this distracted, our kids are seeing this, we’re always at work and where are they? Always on their devices.

And how many times have you guys heard, “What do you mean you don’t know. I posted it on Facebook.” So for some reason now we’re all supposed to know about each other’s lives, because they posted it on Facebook.

And I don’t know that you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, you didn’t tell me last week, when we were at brunch.

And what do we present really when we are on Facebook? We present an idyllic life. Perfect parenting. Great relationships. We hardly ever give any bad news or copy about ourselves, because that doesn’t make for a lot of likes .

Different high school group I was speaking to and they raised their hand and educated me on something I didn’t know. They said, ‘You know, we wait until 5 o’clock before we post our Instagram pictures. Because that’s when we know all of our friends are out and we’ll get the most traffic.’

I thought that was pretty interesting and then they started talking a little bit more about how they get jealous.

So if one person gets more likes on Instagram than the other, then they just take it down. So there’s all this emotional turmoil and strife going on with our number of likes, somehow equaling our self-esteem.

We are all our own public relations firms always trying to figure out how we can increase our numbers. Work sometimes demands that from us as well. Certainly we do that a lot in our personal life.

And this is what we present on Facebook. I mean here’s who we really are in real life, and this is what we present on Facebook. Guilty a little bit of it?

We have the selfie now. And if you think about a selfie it’s rather a sad invention. It’s us taking a picture of ourselves, by ourselves. Maybe we can get two more people if somebody really has a long arm.

The bathroom selfie! I find this hilarious. I see it all the time. ‘I’m like, oh great!’ That’s you in front of a mirror. Great going to a party I probably was not invited to. That you’re going to be selfie-ing your way through, while I watch ‘Home Alone’ on Facebook.

We have the Oscar selfie . That was a lot of fun that crashed the Twitter feed. I think most people know and then we have the funeral selfie. Not so fun. She looks very unpleased.

And we have the driving selfie because I mentioned the research shows that won’t kill you at all.

I think we would all live life better if we had hands to hold rather than keys to click.

Thank you, thank you!

I think we need to take that pause in our life. Make mud pies, build a fort, take the time to gaze at the clouds, for rhinoceroses and unicorns… Screen free!

And if change starts from within, we are that change. We can be that change. And teach our kids what it was like before we lived life in front of a screen.

We can use social media to create positive face-to-face groups and organizations and meeting places like we have tonight. Not hashtag activism but people activism.

We need to look up and see who our neighbor is. We need to look up and put that phone away. Make a human connection, teach human interaction, as if it were as important as the very breath we breathe. Look up at me, look up at each other, and look up at you.

And I’m going to ask everyone in here to take a screen-free challenge. Unplug for one hour a day and if you like this message please share it.

Thank you very much.

Want a summary of this talk? Here it is.

Allison Graham’s talk, titled “How Social Media Makes Us Unsocial,” highlights several key points about the impact of social media on our lives and relationships.

1. Disconnecting Us: Graham begins by emphasizing the disconnection caused by excessive social media use. She shares a video clip illustrating how people are often engrossed in their devices even when in the presence of others, leading to a sense of neglect and disconnection.

2. Decline in Close Relationships: Graham references a Gallup poll from 2001 and 2023, revealing a significant decline in the number of close friends reported by the average American—from ten to just two. She suggests that social media may be a contributing factor to this decline.

3. Over-Reliance on Technology: Graham highlights society’s obsession with smartphones, emphasizing that people check their phones approximately 150 times a day. This constant connectivity can lead to a feeling that whoever is on the other end of the screen is more important than those physically present.

4. Shortened Vocabulary: The talk addresses the impact of text messaging on language and communication. Graham warns that the trend of abbreviating words may lead to a loss of nuance and personal expression in our vocabulary.

5. Distracted Driving: Graham highlights the dangerous consequences of texting while driving, noting that it has become the leading cause of death for teens, surpassing drinking and driving. She encourages responsible smartphone use, even at stop signs or traffic lights.

6. Work-Life Balance: Graham discusses how adults are constantly connected to work through their devices, which can set a bad example for children who then become immersed in their own screens. This constant distraction affects family dynamics.

7. Social Media Image: The talk touches on the facade people present on social media, often showcasing an idealized version of their lives. Graham notes that this can lead to jealousy and low self-esteem among users, particularly teenagers.

8. Selfies and Narcissism: Graham discusses the rise of the selfie and its implications. She humorously points out that it’s essentially taking a picture of oneself, alone. She also mentions the trend of taking selfies in inappropriate places, like funerals or while driving.

9. Seeking Real Connections: Graham advocates for a pause in our digital lives and encourages real-world activities and interactions. She emphasizes the importance of teaching children the value of human connection and interaction.

10. Screen-Free Challenge: To conclude, Graham calls on the audience to take a screen-free challenge, unplugging for at least one hour a day. She suggests that through this, we can reconnect with one another and teach the younger generation the significance of genuine human connections.

In her talk, Allison Graham highlights the need for balance in our digital lives, encouraging us to be mindful of the impact of technology on our relationships and well-being while promoting the importance of genuine human interactions.

Resources for Further Reading:

Ben Halpert: Technology Addiction and What you Can do About It (Transcript)

Connected, but alone? By Sherry Turkle at TED (Transcript)

Bailey Parnell: Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health? (Transcript)

Dr. Cal Newport: Quit Social Media at TEDxTysons (Full Transcript)

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• Jensen Huang’s Speech At Caltech 2024 Commencement (Transcript)
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• An Optimist’s Take on Reskilling in the Age of AI: Sagar Goel (Transcript)
• With AI, Anyone Can Be a Coder Now: Thomas Dohmke (Transcript) 
• With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand The Real World: Fei-Fei Li (Transcript)

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The Anti-Social Writing Process

Is it possible to be anti-social in today’s world?

Even when we’re lying in bed being “anti-social,” what are we really doing? Staring at our phones, scrolling through social media? Reading books full of words and messages?

Human writing practices seem to be innately social—we write so that our words may be read.

Marilyn Cooper profoundly comments on this social nature of writing in her essay “ The Ecology of Writing .” In it, she rejects the previously postulated cognitive process model of writing as being too internalized and solitary. Instead, she argues that writing occurs within a complex, reciprocal ecology, in which readers shape the process of writing and writers shape that of reading. In other words, this ecological model hinges on social interaction between writers and readers.

But perhaps humans can be a little too social, reading communications they weren’t supposed to. In response to this need for increased privacy, I would argue that an anti-social writing process has arisen: encryption.

Encryption is the scrambling or encoding of data to prevent unauthorized entities from reading it; only the parties with the key to unlock the encryption can interpret the data. Search engines do it all the time to protect our precious data, which they claim not to sell but still manage to monetize and distribute to advertisers. Ohio State physics professor Dan Gauthier created “tamper-proof” encryption for drones, exploiting minute discrepancies in drones’ microchips to make data purportedly impossible to read.

The reasoning for encryption’s proposed status as an anomalously anti-social writing process stems from the separation of the writing processes of data and encryption; the data being encrypted already exists in a legible form—it has already been written. Encryption is a subsequent, discrete writing process aimed entirely at making this data unreadable (see the image below).

But what about other forms of private writing, like diaries or Morse Code ? Couldn’t these be considered anti-social writing processes?

As for diaries, the societal taboo or expectation of privacy makes them anti-social, not the physical writing itself; a diary user inevitably enters their writing into the social conversation by creating the possibility of it being read.

With Morse Code, the act of encoding causes you to inevitably transcribe the message—you still spell out all the words, just with different symbols (and hence participate in social writing). But encryption comes in after the message has been written and simply scrambles or locks the preexisting data. The text of encryption itself is often a series of algorithms , not a message.

Yet, despite the anti-social nature of encryption, it is still reactionary and reciprocal, like the writing and reading that takes place in Cooper’s ecology. Encryption must adapt as unauthorized “readers” become better at “reading” encrypted data, and these “readers” must also adapt if they want to intercept and interpret encrypted data.

Surely this is not a position Cooper expected to defend—an anti-social writing process infiltrating her social ecology of writing—yet it is an interesting one nonetheless.

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The  AVM  Theory

Individuality makes us different, respect brings us together.

• Anushri Gharbude
• Jan 5, 2022

Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial?

A conversation that's plaguing both youngsters and adults; the impact of social media and chat tools on our lives has always been debated, and it is impossible to conclude whether it's good or bad. Too much is too bad. It is true with all aspects of life, isn't it?

Statistics show how social media is hampering lives on many fronts, be it personal, family, or professional. It is an age where popularity is based on the number of likes. As a result, we are becoming more antisocial by being more active on social media sites.

Since social media is a massive superpower today, it is on us to take responsibility and control it. It has given us a fantastic advantage to communicate, share our ideas and opinions, and bring people from all around the world together. However, at the same time, it has also made it easy for people to fake their lives, spread lies, and become more insecure about themselves.

Instead of us controlling our social media, social media controls us. However, every person should know that they are not defined by the number of likes, comments, and followers on their social media. There is no way that a single account on social media can encapsulate the brilliant unique personality of a human being. On social media, we are not paying for the product, but we are the product, and we are letting others attribute value to us and get experimented on.

Because of social media, we walk around searching for feedback and pleasing other people while the only approval we need is of ourselves and no one else. 99% of our lives, the significant portion, the behind-the-scenes, the unglamorous, unfiltered, day-to-day mundane normality is never shown on social media, and we end up comparing our behind-the-scenes to other peoples fake Highlight Reel.

Moreover, using others as a mirror or benchmark for how we should look, how successful we should be, or how we should live our lives.

Social media is like an empty road with no traffic lights, zebra crossing, or maps and no one to guide you for where to go. If you take the right turn, have correct judgment, and know your limits, you are safe and on the right path, but one wrong turn can make you forget your reality, make you conscious about yourself, cause anxiety, depression, and so much more.

You will become your happy self, a better half, when you stop putting pressure on yourself to become someone else. As snobbish as it may sound, everyone needs to be full of self-worth. The truth is that when you know you are doing the right thing in your own eyes, it will hardly matter what others say. Everyone has different expectations, values, and perceptions. There is no right or wrong. Sometimes it is just society and social pressures because we pester ourselves to look perfect, and social media fuels this fire. The truth is that a picture will always tell an incomplete story, and it is on us how much we let it affect our lives.

The rising influence of social media has pushed people to live on the web. Eating out for a photo, travelling for a photo, squandering money for a perfect photo, and without a doubt, it has become a dystopian society of deceit.

It doesn't matter how active you are on these channels. The impact that you create and the value you add to social matters. Let's all become humans from digital beings. Let's rekindle the family dinners, hang out with friends and interact with our hearts.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Effects of Social Media — Social Media Does Not Make People Less Social

Social Media Does not Make People Less Social

• Categories: Effects of Social Media Socialization

About this sample

Words: 1202 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 1202 | Pages: 2 | 7 min read

• Forest, A. L., & Wood, J. V. (2012). When social networking is not working: Individuals with low self-esteem recognize but do not reap the benefits of self-disclosure on Facebook. Psychological science, 23(3), 295-302. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797611429709) 2
• Miller, D., Sinanan, J., Wang, X., McDonald, T., Haynes, N., Costa, E., ... & Nicolescu, R. (2016). How the world changed social media (p. 286). UCL press. (https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32834)
• Sivek, S. C. (2010). Social media under social control: Regulating social media and the future of socialization. Electronic news, 4(3), 146-164. (https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/mscmfac_pubs/6/)
• Gonzalez, E., Leidner, D., Riemenschneider, C., & Koch, H. (2013). The impact of internal social media usage on organizational socialization and commitment. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287512158_The_impact_of_internal_social_media_usage_on_organizational_socialization_and_commitment)
• Cai, D., Liu, J., Zhao, H., & Li, M. (2020). Could social media help in newcomers' socialization? The moderating effect of newcomers’ utilitarian motivation. Computers in Human Behavior, 107, 106273. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563220300297)

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

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