I think part of the problem is that social media, and Facebook in particular, has cheapened the meaning of the word "friend."
I see people on HN all the time saying that they have better friends far away via social media than they have in their own neighborhoods and offices. It's popular inside the tech bubble to believe that digital communication is as good or better than real communication, but it isn't.
That's a lesson one of my family members is learning right now, and the rest of us by proxy.
She was walking to work one day and got run over by a car. Living in a different state, 1,300 miles from her family, she didn't bother making new friends because she could still communicate digitally with the people already in her online relationship cloud.
But where are they in her time of need? When she needs actual friends, not social media friends? None of her Facebook "friends" are going to go to her apartment and bring clean underwear and toiletries to her in the hospital. None of her Twitter followers are going to move her car so she doesn't accumulate tickets over the next six months when the street sweepers and snow plows come. None of her Instagram people are coming to see her, to comfort her, to see how she's doing and just talk to her during visiting hours.
When she regained the use of one hand, she started looking at social media again, and realized it is all so hollow. Talk, platitudes, and shameless self-promotion does not make a real relationship.
When she comes out of this, I hope she realizes the value of real human-to-human connections. But because she's as addicted to social media as the companies want her to be, I believe she will relapse into the void of fake friendships once again.
I'm not sure I buy your explanation at all. Social media may make distant friends feel closer, but I don't think this explains the lack of close friends. I understand that this is a data point of 1, but this article and the HN comments all ring true to me, and I hardly ever use social media.
Most of my not very close friends also don't use social media. A friend of mine tried creating a group on facebook to help coordinate social events for a group of dads and almost universally the wives ended up RSVPing for their respective husband.
When we ended up getting together we ended up talking about work and our houses and all the different things we're doing. Men have a tendency to communicate differently (IMO society has trained us to do so) than women. When my wife gets together with her friends they talk about how they're feeling about things and their relationships. This leads to men having a tendency to have more superficial relationships.
It feels like a probable reason. Imagine moving to another place while still keeping exactly the same contact with the same people in the old place and imagine doing the same, with no contact of the same people.
In the later case, you will most likely force yourself out to meet and engage with people because eventually you will long it. You might not need a lot of it, but seems human really need at least some other human contact (most of us at least).
In the first case, you get human contact, but only the surface. Would probably take you way longer to realize you need that in-person human contact.
I see people on HN all the time saying that they have better friends far away via social media than they have in their own neighborhoods and offices. It's popular inside the tech bubble to believe that digital communication is as good or better than real communication, but it isn't.
That's a lesson one of my family members is learning right now, and the rest of us by proxy.
She was walking to work one day and got run over by a car. Living in a different state, 1,300 miles from her family, she didn't bother making new friends because she could still communicate digitally with the people already in her online relationship cloud.
But where are they in her time of need? When she needs actual friends, not social media friends? None of her Facebook "friends" are going to go to her apartment and bring clean underwear and toiletries to her in the hospital. None of her Twitter followers are going to move her car so she doesn't accumulate tickets over the next six months when the street sweepers and snow plows come. None of her Instagram people are coming to see her, to comfort her, to see how she's doing and just talk to her during visiting hours.
When she regained the use of one hand, she started looking at social media again, and realized it is all so hollow. Talk, platitudes, and shameless self-promotion does not make a real relationship.
When she comes out of this, I hope she realizes the value of real human-to-human connections. But because she's as addicted to social media as the companies want her to be, I believe she will relapse into the void of fake friendships once again.