Dear Commons Community,

Technology and loneliness are interlinked, researchers have found, stoked by the ways we interact with social media, text messaging and binge-watching.

Brian X. Chen, the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use, has a featured article in today’s New York Times entitled, How Tech Created a “Recipe for Loneliness.”  He documents three behaviors that are correlate social media use and loneliness as follows:

• On social media apps like Instagram, many fell into the trap of comparing themselves with others and feeling that they were lagging behind their peers.
• Text messaging, by far the most popular form of digital communication, could be creating a barrier to authentic connection.
• And, perhaps unsurprisingly, some people who felt lonely also exhibited addictive personalities — in this case, to streaming videos — that kept them indoors.

Here is an excerpt:

“Over the summer, Laura Marciano, a researcher at Harvard, interviewed 500 teenagers for a continuing study investigating the link between technology and loneliness. The results were striking.

For several weeks, the teenagers, who were recruited with the help of Instagram influencers, answered a questionnaire three times a day about their social interactions. Each time, more than 50 percent said they had not spoken to anyone in the last hour, either in person or online.

To put it another way, even though the teenagers were on break from school and spending plenty of time on social media apps, most of them were not socializing at all.

Americans now spend more time alone, have fewer close friendships and feel more socially detached from their communities than they did 20 years ago. One in two adults reports experiencing loneliness, the physiological distress that people endure from social isolation. The nation’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness an epidemic late last year.

Ever since, scholars and psychologists have accelerated research into whether technology is contributing. The rise of smartphones and social networking apps has forever changed social norms around how we communicate. More personable interactions like phone calls have been superseded by text messages. When people broadcast their lives on TikTok and Instagram, they may not be representing themselves in a genuine way.

“It’s hard to know who’s being real online, and it’s hard for people to be themselves online, and that is a recipe for loneliness,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview. He concluded that loneliness had become an epidemic after reviewing scientific studies and speaking with college students last year, he said.

I went down a rabbit hole for the last few months reading research papers and interviewing academics about tech and loneliness. (Many studies focused on how younger people used technology, but their conclusions were still relevant to older adults who used the same tech.)

The consensus among scholars was clear: While there was little proof that tech directly made people lonely (plenty of socially connected, healthy people use lots of tech), there was a strong correlation between the two, meaning that those who reported feeling lonely might be using tech in unhealthy ways.

Chen goes on to describe further what we should know and what to do with your tech if you’re feeling lonely.

The entire article is worth a read!

Tony

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