7 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: About loneliness and how our interactions are reducing day by day
Social media is often used to replace face to face interactions. People feel lonelier due to social comparison — or the act of comparing themselves to others. The more people compare themselves to others while using social media, the less happy they feel. Face to face interactions don't really have this issue due to nuances of nonverbal cues.
There's probably outliers to this concept, but there's tons of research indicating that social media heavily contributes to feelings of loneliness.
A book I read that covered this concept in fantastic detail was The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
Comment by HotterRod at 26/11/2024 at 20:00 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Loneliness is not the same as unhappiness. There's ample research that social media use makes people unhappy through the comparison mechanism that you mention, but the results are more mixed on whether it makes people specifically *lonely*. For example, a 2016 study found that mobile phone time contributed to loneliness less than TV watching time[1] and a 2017 study found that using social media to talk about TV shows made people feel less lonely than watching TV alone[2].
2: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2017.1350715