The American Loneliness: New Definitions of Friendship in the Silent Era

In the last ten to fifteen years accompanying the dawn of social media, means of communication among friends and strangers have been easier than ever. Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has grown into the largest social media site on the Internet with 30 million users and counting. The ability to catch up with former high school friends who are now across the country or see how an aunt in Pittsburgh has been doing since the birth of her son are now as simple as the click of a mouse. However, the amount of “friends” acquired on social media may not be an accurate reflection of how many close relationships one truly shares. In an article from Bigthink.com titled “Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends?”, Steven Mazie gathers research from Pew Research Center about statistics surrounding Facebook

In “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova, social media has significantly changed the way we interact with friends and family. Everybody thinks that using social media is the best way to talk to friends and family, however, in my opinion, they are wrong because it doesn’t give you the face-to-face connections we need as humans for social interaction. On the other hand, the great thing about using social media is you can connect with more people, but in a superficial kind of way. Therefore, we do not get the face-to-face interactions with our friends and family. We, the people that are addicted to social media, learn that without face-to-face conversations we wouldn’t have a normal “social” life outside of social media. The question

In Stephen Marche’s article, Facebook is a reason people are becoming move lonely and standard. The relationship between technology and loneliness is strong. According to the article people who spend their time on devices and social network sights are finding themselves lacking in the ability to communicate in person. One effect that is brought up throughout the article is loneliness, in which is made the more often one drowns themselves in social media. Facebook in particular, is the

So by quoting this data Halpern demonstrates that looking back more than 200 years and comparing it to modern times, people are entering into marriage later in life, there are fewer large families, and more people are living by themselves. However, looking back only a few decades he concludes that the number of young people in America who are living alone is increasing very quickly. He further supports that the increase in occupations that are solitary in nature are also contributing to the loneliness of America, which Halpern describes in his introduction as “traveling salesmen, Web designers, phone-bank operators, and online day traders who live and work in

Social media is in it 's prime. It is how everyone connects with their friends, family and anyone around the world. Facebook has become hugely popular especially with adolescents. In the article, Loneliness and Facebook Motives in Adolescence: A Longitudinal Inquiry into Directionality of Effect, research has investigated the relationship between Facebook use and adolescent loneliness. They researched 256 adolescents with the median age of 15 were examined to see how Facebook motives and two relationship-specific forms of adolescent loneliness were associated longitudinally. (Luyckx, Teppers, Goossens, Klimstra, 2014). Results reveal that peer-related loneliness relates over time to using Facebook, compensating their social skills, reduces isolation feeling, and engaging in interpersonal contact. While Facebook allows them to make new friends online, it is diminishing their actual social skills when it comes to real life contact.

Technology is one main reason why people have disengaged from social life and become more isolated. People have learned that they do not need to actually talk to someone physically to make a new friend. This is a problem because the idea of going up to someone and starting a conversation will slowly become unknown. This will consequence in the extinction of the traditional human interaction people used to have. Turkle believes that when people use “the advantage of screen communication,” and technology to reach out to others, there is a downgrade in the quality of the relationship (Turkle 374). There is no certainty in knowing if someone is being genuine or if they are even who they say they are online. People have learned to use technology

Stephen Marche’s article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely” explores the complex issues regarding loneliness. “Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing…” (The Atlantic), Marche states. Loneliness is a physiological mantra and a projection of an individual’s feelings about life and their surroundings. Loneliness is by far one of the most detrimental epidemics because it is sly; many people do not identify loneliness to be an actual factor of bad health. Bad health can originate from a prolonged feeling of being alone therefore can affect the human body itself. In his article, Marche continues to discuss several scientists’ perspectives and references a myriad of social experiments composed around the issue of correlation or causation between

In the article, “The Quagmire of Social Media Friendships”, Curtis Silver opens with his social evolution through social media. He begins by saying how he once had solid, quality friendships but later found himself with thousands of obsolete ones. Although he makes many direct points of the communal effects that social media has on society, his argument lacks valid analysis of how people's personal lives are actually affected. Social media connects us to many different people that we are forced to call our friends online by the social network, however, these people cannot be considered actual friends on this basis.

Society today has us connected more than ever. Over one billion people are active on Facebook and other social networks. In other words, there are more Facebook users then there are people in the United States and Mexico combined. Use of technology, usually like the internet, has brought people together ranging from KONY 2012 to seeing a relative that lives hundreds of miles away. It could be argued that sharing of ideas and being entirely connected has almost been globally reached and implemented, but the result of these virtual profiles, and being globally connected is tragic: People are becoming more lonely than ever. Use of technology such as the internet has given people the opportunity to be connected, but in reality “more than 78% of

John Steinbeck, author Of Mice and Men, paints a whole world of lonesomeness that creates an inevitable obstacle at every corner of life. Steinbeck lives through the characters of his story explaining the concept he perceives of loneliness. The way the characters talk, live, and even interact with the world and each other forms a world of isolation and solitude. Steinbeck integrates his ideas together to form a main theme of loneliness, one who has no friends or company, that none of the characters can avoid.

After reading the DebRobertis article on technology and loneliness, I chose to write about an article that states the benefits of technology and how it can assist in decreasing loneliness, particularly in the older generations. Technology has many benefits in a wide array of fields. However, in some cases it can impact social relations. People are less likely to have actual face to face conversations, physically interact with other people in the outside world, increase the lengths of their work days by operating on technology when not at work, and become more aggressive from television shows or video games. On the other hand, adults over 65 could greatly benefit from technology, as they seem to be the ones to suffer from loneliness the most.

Loneliness is often not considered as a risk to a person physical health. People are subject to loneliness at all stages of life, but it is more frequent for the elderly. The effects of the lack of companionship or the perception of it could represent bad consequences of the health state of older people. In today’s American society it is very common that the elder people is left in nursery homes so the family does not have to actually take care of them and not feel guilt about it. Even though at the nursery homes they are well taken care of, they can experience a great amount of loneliness because of the lack of close contact with their family. I will explore the effects of loneliness and its relations to health risk on the last stage of life. My research will analyze how people experience loneliness and their unconscious physical reaction to it. The case study from which my research is stating out is known as The Roseto effect. Around 1960s the Italian community of Roseto, Pennsylvania, had a heart attack rate of half the average on the rest of the communities around them. Researchers found that the only factor different between the Roseto people and the people of the other communities was the lack of loneliness on the Rosetans. Over the years the community “Americanize” and stated to have isolated individuals that were stressing out with American life and drifted away from the close community; as a result of this by 1992 the Rosetans had the same heart attack rates as the rest. In my research I want to explore and explain both sides of the Roseto effect, having a close community and low

The internet eliminates the need for face-to-face contact and makes people more accustomed this new radical way in which humanity communicates. Behind a phone or computer screen, all characteristics of innate human communication are destroyed, removing audible, as well as physical cues. The importance of such is critical and necessary to one’s psychological well-being and social prowess. Subsequently, a person’s face-to-face communication skills have been proven to have degraded from the overuse of social media (Text 3). It is unclear whether people resort to social media due to the feelings of loneliness, or if social media is the cause, however, those feelings were not alleviated through social media use. The direct relationship between loneliness and amount of time spent on social technology can be shown

Riding horseback, lounging in a carriage, travelling by train turned metro, through all these years of industrial innovation humanity has needed social interaction. These social interactions have gone from intimate gatherings, to newspapers, to social networking, and people made advancements in ways to gather information faster and in turn dealt away their social presence. Today, young adults throw themselves into an alternate reality which many use to protect them from loneliness while it drags others into remote depths.

This evolution has yielded ever-expanding ways of communicating with people over the internet. No longer is it possible to only send text messages. Now, people can send text, pictures, videos and more and have access to all of these files via their social networking accounts. While these changes have given wonder and amazement to our capabilities, the effects such changes have had on friendship are not all positive. Increased emphasis on social networking and digital communications have undermined the newer generation’s ability and proclivity to build and sustain traditional normal and healthy human relationships (Ad Age 2006).