Are Friends Electric?

The holiday season, for many, is a time of great joy, but for others it is a nightmare of loneliness. In fact, Christmas serves to highlight and heighten two defining problems of the digital age – social isolation and loneliness. As governments continue to invest in technology to tackle the epidemic of loneliness, researchers continue to say that social media produces more loneliness. Is it the case that one of these positions is a terrible error?

The juxtaposition of recent features in newspapers concerning seasonal loneliness, reports on government initiatives to tackle social isolation, and new research into social media and loneliness, throws into stark contrast the potential contradictions and problems for those concerned with using digital technology to address these social issues.

Loneliness can be said to result from a mismatch between desired, and perhaps expected, levels of social contact and the quality of that contact experienced in actuality. The effects of social isolation are burdensome in the extreme for the sufferer and their support agencies. Its growth has been rapid and dramatic, and recent reports illuminate the problem for many at this time of year¹. Paralleling the growth in real loneliness is the growth in virtual relationships through social media, with industry figures suggesting up to 90% of younger people communicate through social media.² The major questions are: can technology help to alleviate the problem of loneliness, or is it fuelling the problem?; is it fundamentally unfeasible to suggest a virtual solution to this real problem?

Governments around the world are increasingly recognising the problems of social isolation and loneliness, and are looking to a range of potential solutions, including digital technology, to solve them. In the UK, the Government has announced a major, multi-million pound initiative on loneliness³, but, at its core, this initiative is struggling with the apparent contradictions at the heart of the digital age.

For example, Prime Minister May has said³: “Loneliness can affect anyone of any age and background….Furthermore, as our society continues to evolve, so otherwise welcome advances can also increase the risk of loneliness….the warmth of human contact risks receding from our lives.”; while Cabinet Office Minister, Oliver Dowden said⁴: “I am delighted that our funding for innovative tech companies is helping to tackle loneliness….”. Is it possible to square this particularly vicious circle?

The empirical answer to this key and complex question may be a rather simple ‘no’. A recent innovative study⁵ found that a group of students, limited to using social media for just 30 minutes a day, for three weeks, experienced significant reductions in both loneliness and symptoms of depression, relative to a control group with no such limits on their social media use (Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat). In fact, it needs to be recognised that this is very powerful evidence against the effectiveness of social media as a weapon targeting loneliness, in that it experimentally manipulates the controlling social media variable, and confirms the relationship between social media use and loneliness that was only suggested by previous correlational-based studies.

There may be many reasons why social media does not help overcome loneliness, including less than positive social comparisons with others’ ‘sanitised lives’, and the ‘fear of missing out’. However, we could comfort ourselves that maybe such negative findings only paint part of the picture, and if only we could find the right methods through which to employ social media, then it might produce more-positive social results. For example, the UK Government suggests³: “Social media is often highlighted as a cause of loneliness, particularly among young people, but research implies that the picture is more nuanced.”

Ironically, an examination of the concept of friendship made by Aristotle over 2,000 years ago⁶ may put out of court the notion, even a nuanced one, that digital communication may ever be able to alleviate loneliness. Application of this ancient analysis to this very modern technology suggests that social media may never produce the necessary conditions for the meaningful and fulfilling social relationships necessary to overcome loneliness – central to these core conditions for friendship are ‘reciprocity’ and ‘empathy’.

Reciprocity – exchanging things with others for mutual benefit – is not a strong suit for social media, which may not produce ‘friends’, so much as ‘social capital’ – networks of potentially useful connections. Users average around 150 Facebook ‘friends’ each, of whom, perhaps, four may actually be trusted, and over half will be lost each seven years.⁷ This number of virtual acquaintances is well in excess of anything we are apparently evolved to deal with, and can potentially lead to distressing social overload. Compounding the problem is that such social networks often are fuelled and enhanced by careful ‘impression management’ – which, at best, means presenting our positive side (and, at worst, it means deliberate intimidation of others by showing how much better you are than them at life), leading to all of the depressive problems associated with invidious social comparisons.

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Relatedly, the experience of empathy may be limited by the very medium of digital communication. Many of the factors required for empathy simply are not available to users of this technology – such as an ability to process body language, voice tones, and other interactive subtleties, during episodes of social communication. The problem of producing virtual empathy is also hindered by the above-mentioned attempts at impression management. According to Aristotle: “A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend’s existence....makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.”⁶, but, if when using social media we are not ourselves – but an edited version of ourselves – this makes true empathy highly problematic, as how can we identify with anybody else through false versions of ourselves?

Interestingly, such problems of increased social isolation and loneliness are not seen when using the old-fashioned telephone to connect and speak with somebody⁸ – only the 11th most used feature of mobile devices². Given this, it could be argued that maybe ‘Skype’, ‘FaceTime’, and the like, will allow positive social interactions, overcome the above problems, and facilitate digital technology reducing loneliness – but wait a minute, we can do that already, it’s called ‘chatting with your friends face-to-face’. If the only way that digital media can overcome loneliness is to become increasingly more and more like the real world, then what is the point of this possibly wasted expense? There may be more cost-effective uses of the ‘loneliness budget’.

All of these considerations – the empirical and the theoretical – mean that we have to face an uncomfortable possibility for the digital age. It may not be that social media does not currently reduce loneliness; it may be that it cannot ever reduce loneliness. To return to the initial question – one of these views may, indeed, be a terrible error, and it’s probably not the one that has the evidence on its side.