The cult of the individual--part 2

In last week's blog, part one of three on creeping individualism, we looked at Eric Klinenberg's book Going Solo, which points out the increasing isolation of Americans. He writes that in 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person, whereas in 2010, 27 percent of households had just one person.

This week, in Part 2, I want to look at an article in the May issue of The Atlantic, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche.

It's an important question, and though it sounds simple, the answer is more complex than a yes or no.

Many if not most of us use Facebook, which has 845 million users and took in $3.7 billion last year. In fact, one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user. And I place my blogs on Facebook. 

While Klinenberg considers the increase in isolation, Marche is interested in the increase in loneliness, which, he says, “makes us miserable.”

He acknowledges that loneliness is hard to define or diagnose. He says the best tool for doing so is the UCLA Loneliness Scale. According to one major study, 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness.

Though loneliness and being alone are not the same, both are on the rise. “In 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters. … By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to.” 

And with the social disintegration that many have described, including Klinenberg and  Robert D. Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, "we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers." Today we have in this country 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists and 30,000 life coaches. "We have outsourced the work of everyday caring," Marche writes.

Further, he writes, “being lonely is extremely bad for your health.” Lonely people are more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an early age, less likely to exercise, more likely to be obese, less likely to survive a serious operation, more likely to be depressed and to suffer dementia.

Marche then asks if Facebook contributes to loneliness or brings us together. Determining an answer is tricky. For example, he asks, “Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?”

Many studies have been done, and more are ongoing. John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, in his 2008 book Loneliness, notes that loneliness affects not only the brain but the basic process of DNA transcription. "When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely."

Cacioppo says that Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing,” he writes. And “the real thing” is actual people, in the flesh.

He points out that “using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another.”

Our experience of loneliness corresponds to the proportion of face-to-face interactions to online interactions. “The greater proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.”

Cacioppo doesn’t blame the technology but calls it a tool. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.”

At the same time, you could argue that cars and other technology have contributed to isolation. 

"The problem," writes Marche, "is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us miserable." When grocery chains like A&P arrived, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers and helped themselves. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors' doors.

Sherry Turkle, in her 2011 book Alone Together, says that the problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete. “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind,” she writes. "But they are the ties that preoccupy."

On Facebook we're always presenting ourselves, and it's planned, not spontaneous.

An Australian study found that “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism and leadership than Facebook nonusers.”

"Rising narcissism," Marche writes, "isn't so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends." In a 2008 survey, among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent, while across all age groups, just over 6 percent of Americans experienced symptoms of NPD.

And narcissism, Marche writes, “is the flip side of loneliness.”

He says the danger of Facebook is that it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. More than half of Facebook users log on every day, and among 18- to 34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up. So it's not just our use of Facebook, as a tool, say, but its ubiquity in our lives. "The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative," Marche writes.

Whereas solitude used to be good for self-reflection, we now think about ourselves all the time. Marche concludes his article thus: “Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”

So is Facebook making us lonely? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly contributes to an environment that produces many lonely people. 

For those of us who believe community--and I don't mean a virtual community--is not only an important value but healthy to us as individuals and to us as a society, we need to pay attention to these forces that contribute to loneliness. 

While Facebook can be a useful tool, we still need human contact. We need others around us with whom we can discuss important matters. We need to care for one another.

Otherwise, our health and the health of our nation and world will continue to worsen.