Loneliness

and Social Networks

July 16th , 2012, 08:38 PM By Ricardo Murer B.S. in Computer Science (USP) and Master's Degree in Communications (USP). Specialist in digital strategy and new technologies. Follow@rdmurer People are not made of bits, and chats are not conversations. Meeting others is beyond digital interfaces. Is it possible to imagine a planet of connected loners? Is it possible for us to be together yet completely distant from one another? Are we building or breaking down our interpersonal relations, increasingly more frequent today via electronic interfaces? On the other hand, our society experiences a moment of transition, especially in the major cities, where more and more people are living by themselves. Could the social networks be playing a psychological support role to millions of loners around the globe? How much of this psychological comfort is there in having "hundreds" of friends, or in receiving hundreds of "likes" to a photo at the beach? What is more, to what extent is the virtual community's space, its remoteness and illusion perceived as such by million of users? According to Sherry Turkley: "We live in a technological universe where we remain in constant communication with each other. And by doing so, we have sacrificed conversations for a simple connection." (TURKLE, 2011). The Internet has ceased to be a technological innovation for quite some time now. Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists today are attracted to social networks like bees to honey. After all, millions people around the world are migrating to "the other side of the screen", and into Facebook, in particular, revealing their feelings, ideas and day-to-day explicitly and unrestrained. Stephen Marche (MARCHE, 2012), mentions an Australian study by Tracii Ryan and Sophia Xenos of the University of Melbourne, where the researchers found a correlation between Facebook users and narcissism: "Facebook users have higher narcissism, exhibitionism and leadership levels than those who do not use Facebook". Actually, social networks (an on Facebook in particular) it is commonplace to speak of one's self, "sharing" feelings, writing and posting anything frenetically, reaching the highest volume and audience possible. Could this be a symptom from being lonely? Since loneliness can be quite subjective where one would feel alone despite being among many. Therefore, by raising my interaction level I could be desiring to "receive more than giving", to be noticed, and to gain more psychological support. The quantity of social interaction to this people is important. And in this case, their loneliness is not because of the social networks like Facebook. The Internet is just another form of expression, accessible, easy to use, and which despite being superficial, serves to relieve the feeling of being alone. Meanwhile, lonely individual continue to grow in numbers around the world. 1

According to data from American consulting firm Euromonitor, over 270 million people in the world, almost 4% of the world's population, lived alone in 2011, representing a growth of 27.6% since 2006, and 77% since 1996. Developing nations currently hold almost half of one-person homes, or 130.7 million people, against 107.5 million in 2006, representing a growth of 21.6%. With that, I do not mean to say that social networks are harboring the lonely individuals of the planet, but that, when we are connected, including in synchronous interactions such as a chat, for example, we are not engaged in a face to face conversation with the other person. We are alone. Just look around you and you will realize how lonely "being connected" is when we sit in front of a computer or some other gadget. If the TV is a collective experience that obliterated dialog (watching a soap opera with the family, for instance), the computer and the new interactive gadgets are suppressing the collective presence. The collective is always "virtualized", on the other side of the screen. In that case, social isolation is real, concrete and is directly linked to online activity. In the social networks the danger is even greater because social isolation becomes worse as people substitute personal contact with several interactive tools. It is impossible to learn of a person's character through his or her Facebook profile, photos or online conversations. Even more critical is the fact that this virtual presence can also be substituted by some binary construction. Avatars are being used to treat children with autism (ZEYNEP, 2012), chatbots or socialbots to be more generic (BOSHMAF, 2011), software programs that behave like people, converse in chat rooms or tweet (such as @trackgirl, for example), and completely false profiles, virtual holograms, proliferate the social networks. Which takes us into the dangerous universe of digital illusion, where even the relations we nurture could be false and deceptive. The social virtual universe is today an essential part of the reality and daily lives of people, but as Jaron Lanier well put it: "the first principle of this new culture is that all reality, including human beings, is a huge information system." (LANIER, 2011). Once converted into binary codes, we are standardized according to pre-defined data structures. It is not just our conversations, pictures or videos, but we ourselves. Technology is not yet capable of simulating (and it will always be a simulation) any human feeling. In essence, we could teleport from this side of the machine to escape loneliness, only to find it waiting for us on the other side. References BARABSI, A.-L. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Publishing, 2002. BENEVENUTO, F. et all . Characterizing user behavior in online social networks. Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA. November 04-06, 2009. BOSHMAF, Y. et all. The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money. ACSAC 11 Dec. 5-9, Orlando, Florida USA. 2011.

HAMPTON, K. et all. Why most Facebook users get more than they give The effect of Facebook power users on everybody else. Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project 1615 L St., NW Suite 700 Washington, D.C. 20036. February, 3, 2012. KIRKPATRICK, D. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World. London: Virgin. 2010. LANIER, J. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, London: Allen Lane. 2010. MARCHE, S. Is Facebook making us lonely? The Atlantic. May, 2012. MILGRAM. S. The small world problem. Psychology today, 2(1):6067, 1967. PARISER, E. The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. The Penguin Press HC. 2011. PESLAK, A. An Empirical Study of Social Networking Behavior Using Theory of Reasoned Action. Conference for Information Systems Applied Research. Proceedings Wilmington North Carolina, USA, v4 n1807. 2011. TURKLE, S. The Flight From Conversation. The New York Times Sunday Review. April, 21, 2012. TURKLE, S. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Book, New York, NY. 2011. ZEYNEP, T. Social Medias Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships. The Atlantic. April 25, 2012.