Facebook and Loneliness

So I do not really know what I am doing with this whole blog thing, but I would like to discuss the two Facebook articles we were assigned to read.

            The first one argued that Facebook is making society, as a whole, lonelier and complacent with being lonely. Stephen Marche, the author, argues, “we live in an accelerating contradiction.” The more Facebook friends we have, the more disconnected we are. He then proceeds to make wide generalizations about facets of American history  and culture. He explains that cowboys who set out to explore the frontier favored their self-pride over their personal relationships. Similarly, he discussed the importance of astronauts in our society and how we view them, in general, as heroes. That’s obviously wrong because in reality, they are selfish loners that didn’t want to be around other humans so they left planet earth. In this portion of his article, he took typical American heroes, picked one aspect of their stereotypical lifestyles, and made them seem self-indulgent. He then linked their self-indulgence to loneliness to make his point that we, as a society, are becoming more lonely and Facebook is really speeding up the process.

            I think that Facebook does have the ability to make people complacent with only fostering relationships through the Internet. However, more often than not, I think that Facebook allows people that would not normally keep up with each other’s lives the opportunity to do so. This tie may make conversation easier when there is face to face contact.

            With this said, I did strongly agree with second article by Katie Roiphe. As much as we may feel connected with various people in our lives, we may never know how accurate the image of them that Facebook perceives really is. This is because people’s posts and pictures are often very choreographed and staged. Because Facebook allows such a narrow portal into lives, it is somewhat easily controlled and people want to make sure they are presenting the best of what they have to offer.

            Personally, I don’t know how conscience I am at staging my Facebook page to make me appear cool or whatever else. If anything, I am more awkward and random than I am in real life. I never post statuses or pictures anymore. So the majority of the things on my page are what others have tagged me in or posted directly on my wall. None of these things provide an actual interpretation to my real life. In fact, they mostly surround some of my pop culture obsessions or cute Pintrest ideas that people for some reason want me to see.

            I don’t think Facebook is necessarily making us more complacent with lonlieness. But I do think it gives us the wrong interpretation of people’s everyday lives.