Social Loneliness and acceptance

Social Loneliness

                Ever since the rise of internet popularity in 1996, the American people have become more secluded.  Many people today have confined themselves to a comfortable, single home life, socializing only through the internet and text messages.  Lack of contact in the world is leading people to more psychological and health problems.  The number of users in social media sites like twitter, Facebook, and MySpace has more than doubled since 2005.  As social media is growing so are the ways that we can easily access these sites.  In the past 5 years we have seen technology grow to the extreme levels with smart phones, tablets, and any other portable computer device we can take on the go.  These components are now equipped with apps that allow us to link quickly to social media sites.  Why has social networking become so highly used?  Well for one we find that the technology to use the media and networking sites has now come at an affordable to cost to the average consumer.  Prior to the year 2000 computers and cell-phones were fairly costly and only the rich were known for carrying high-technological devices around with them daily.  Therefore social networking had very little effect on the average consumer.  Today nearly every business partakes in some form of social networking; it is a cheaper, more effective way to advertise their business and products.

                What people don’t realize is that we are easily drawn in to social media sites.  Not only does it create social loneliness, but it has been shown to create severe mental and other health related issues.  Not only is it creating health issues, but it also has been linked to several environmental issues.  First we will tackle the issue of loneliness itself.  Today technology allows that once out-casted kid to have a place in the world, to make friends and feel the pride and coolness they do not receive in a physical social environment.  It is best stated by Olds & Schwartz (2009), “when we find ourselves isolated, by standing tall in our own minds, side by side with self-reliant heroes, each of us is suddenly no longer alone but part of a group… The psychological magic becomes the spoonful of sugar that makes painful experience of finding ourselves left out easier to swallow.”  Although social media allows us to feel as if we finally fit in to a crowd that may not have been possible before, when we face the reality of it we find that we are more depressed and alone then once thought. Parents that become engrossed in the world of social media, show children, especially teens that social alienation is acceptable.  As part of human nature we need to feel nurtured by another individual.  The effects seem to be at the highest in teenage girls.  When a parent, especially the mother neglects contact with her teenage daughter it causes higher levels of depression and feelings of being socially unaccepted.  Abernathy states (n.d.), “In keeping with her alienation from the mother, the high risk individual is unlikely to have satisfying friendships with other women.  She feels that friendships with women are not worth much, apparently a reflection of her own low self-esteem.  A corollary is that her reportedly most important relationships have been with men.  However, she experiences tension in these interactions, being fearful of not meeting the man's expectations and often feeling disconcertingly dependent and infantilized.”  Because of natural feelings of wanting to be socially accepted teenage girls do often turn to a man for comfort and feelings of acceptance.  This is why teenage pregnancy is once again on the rise!  Women have a higher tendency to feel the need to be accepted than men.  When a man makes a gesture or makes a socially isolated women feel accepted she is more likely to fall into the “love trap”, and doing things that she knows may not be morally right. 

                Many people do not realize the effects that social loneliness has on their health.  Many people that suffer from stress due to loneliness show signs in decreasing health by: blood pressure, sleep problems, adrenocortical activity, diminished immunity, white blood cell count, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and cholesterol are examples of the physiological problems associated with loneliness (Leikas, Saariluoma, Rousi, Kuisma, & Vilpponen, 2012).  House (2001) confirms, “The magnitude of risk associated with social isolation is comparable with that of cigarette smoking and other major biomedical and psychosocial risk factors… Without yet knowing exactly how and why cigarette smoking is damaging to health, much has been done to reduce it and ameliorate its effects. We should be able to do the same with social isolation.”  Often times these health issues go undiagnosed because of social sites like Web M.D.  People today feel that they can diagnose themselves via the internet and attempt home remedies to cure the ailment, when there may very well be a bigger underlying problem.

                On the final note, social isolation leads to the over-use of planet resources.  Today we even find more single household units than ever before.  Single households place a strain on our ecological health.  When a person is extremely lonely and do not have enough people in their lives they often times turn to objects that define their identity through possessions rather than one’s place in society (Olds & Schwartz, 2009).  Because people are choosing to live in single family units we are depleting the Earth’s resources faster than technology allows us to replenish it.  Jowit (2008) states, “The Living Planet report calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species.”   Social isolation also increases the amount of obesity we see in society.  People are consuming hirer amounts of food from being in a state of depression which leads to more cryogenically processed foods, which also creates unhealthiness and obesity in individuals.  The planets electricity resources are also declining from the greater use of technological devices being on for longer periods of time. 

                So to put it short and simple, social media sites do make us feel lonely, but they also make us feel socially accepted when we are not otherwise made to feel acceptance.  In the long run social media does more harm than good by running out Earth’s natural supplies and creating more undiagnosed health problems.  We find more people opting to work from home then to be out in the world. We find more parents taking to social sites and becoming addicted to the social acceptance or games and possibly even both.  We have become less intelligent in the world and creating more communication problems within marriages.  Social media creates deindividuation in people, meaning we lose our self-awareness of our surroundings and accountability for our own actions.  We are more likely to become angry and aggressive in an online setting, which can carry out into the outside world when we do have to actually make contact with others in society.  We simply just lose our sense of self (forget how to be normal)!!!

References

Abernathy, V. (n.d.). Illegitimate conception among teenagers. American Journal of Public Health, 662-664.

House, J. S. (2001, March 1). Social isolation kills, but how and why? Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 63, 273-274.

Jowit, J. (2008, October 28). World is facing a natural resources crisis worse than financial crunch. Retrieved from TheGuardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/29/climatechange-endangeredhabitats

Leikas, J., Saariluoma, P., Rousi, R. A., Kuisma, E., & Vilpponen, H. (2012). Life-based design to combat loneliness among older people. The Journal of Community Informatics .

Marchie, S. (2012, May). Is Facebook making us lonely? The Atlantic.

Olds, J., & Schwartz, R. S. (2009, March-April). The Lonely American. UTNE Reader.