Face This: How Facebook Keeps Us Strangers
Elizabeth Bernstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal, astutely observes that the promise of Facebook and Twitter—to bring people closer by putting their lives online, with up-to-the-minute updates—can have the opposite effect. Many people, she writes, use “friending” and “tweeting” as a surface and synthetic way to talk about the fun outings they’re planning or the fact that they just closed another sale at work.
“I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or event write a decent email,” Bernstein writes, “yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes . . . or tweeting about their latest whereabouts.”
That’s just the beginning from a psychological point of view. Facebook and other social-media “destinations” not only provide cover from more genuine and intimate human interactions, they can encourage people to present themselves as actors in their own semi-made-up life stories. They can remove people from reality, heightening their narcissism (which we all have, to a lesser or greater extent), making them not only self-obsessed, but intent on projecting a multi-media fictional representation of how happy and successful and social they are.
As Marshall McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message. There is no avoiding the fact that social-media sites call upon members to use a keyboard, hard drive and computer screen, together with photos, video and words to create evolving autobiographies for “broadcast” on the Web. This very process creates a kind of dual existence, consisting of one’s real life and one’s life on-line. The online version can pull people away from their deepest thoughts and emotions and relationships—from what constitutes their real selves—into the abbreviated or evasive or attention-grabbing kind that can be packaged for mass consumption.
This is more than an academic concern. It’s a human and clinical concern. The distance between a person’s contrived self and real self is the growing place for anxiety and depression. Today’s social-media sites can expand that distance until, distracted too long from the noble and, ultimately, healing battle to understand oneself and others for real, swells of genuine emotion feel like tidal waves.
Indeed, I have already worked with several clients for whom using social media sites has, in and of itself, coaxed them away from the truth about their lives, toward a kind of technologically intoxicated vacation from it. Together, we struggle to take the journey back.
Anatole Broyard, the late and great NY Times book critic, once wrote, “Inside every patient, there’s a poet trying to get out.” We could now add that behind every Facebook profile, there’s a real life story just waiting to be told.
Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.
Tags: Dr. Keith Ablow, Elizabeth Bernstein, Facebook, media, social networking, tweeting, twitter, Wall Street Journal
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I have to disagree with FaceBook keepin’ us strangers. In fact it’s just the opposite.
I have just recently found (or they found me) friends from all the way back to High School.
We converse and have caught up with goings on amongst our families and friends.
I think it’s a good thing to have…free communication and ways to share things we couldn’t otherwise do.
Kittie
“…intent on projecting a multi-media fictional representation of how happy and successful and social they are.”
This can be true, however, I’ve also frequently seen people who use facebook and twitter (during their college years especially) to feed and incite drama in order to gain sympathy and attention. Their dramatic, one-sided tales of hardship and emotional distress may be true to some extent, but they are devalued in the open forum and brushed aside quickly. There has arisen a constant need to have something either wonderful or terrible going on in order to gain attention, among other things.
I find myself counseling my younger friends to take off the mask of drama and let just a few people know them better, but to invest their lives in something besides their own narcissism. I wish they would.
Social networks bring us together and reunite old friends, but honestly, how many will be there when you are sick, dying, lonely, heart broken, fighting for change, especially when change is not a popular opinion? This why he is saying it keeps us strangers, because we rarely develop intimate relationships on facebook. Connie
I totally agree with your assessment and concerns. I graduated with a BS in Sociology and am currently a pastor’s wife, and full time homeschooling mom. Facebooking will never be able to replace live interactions with other human beings. Technology has brought us convenient ways to “communicate”, but it has robbed us of meaningful in person relating. I prefer a good face to face conversation over a great cup of coffee to aid in cultivating a truly meaningful relationship =).
I was already too shy to pick up a phone and call anyone but about 2 people in the world. I live hundreds of miles from most of my family and old friends, and thousands away from some cousins I haven’t laid eyes on in 30-40 years. Facebook has brought me CLOSER to people. I wouldn’t have as good relationships without it, let alone any better. I am who I am. Have been for 57 years. Facebook didn’t make me the way I am. It just gave me one possible way to overcome it.
This is the 3rd article I have read this week saying variations of the same thing. I found all of them after I had a private revolt from Facebook for many of the same reasons. I am currently on hiatus so apparently I don’t need intervention; I can stop any time I want to
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My own blog on the subject was about social networking sites as being more of a “seminar” forum than a conversation with a few intimate friends. The wider our network becomes, the less we know of our audience, and too many have forgotten public speech etiquette, or ineed realize each post is to a large and diverse group.
[...] I came across an interesting article on social media [...]
I am very pleased with your professional insight regarding this “social network” sites. For years now, I have been warning my teenaged kids about the dangers of not only “making friends” but the lack of personal interaction with people. What ever happeb\ned to walking to visit a friend? or having a heart to heart conversation with your best friend?
Another fad has me concern: texting. The dialog (personal interaction) , once more is being lost. Not to mention the use of proper language .
In a world of state of the art communication, we are allowing ourselves to be isolate shunning away from our friends and family, leaving us feeling lonely at the end of the day.
Thank you for posting your valuable oppinion.
Sincerely,
Silvia Plantener
This goes along with our fast-food life and is part of the reason mindfulness is such a hot topic at continuing education seminars. Living in the moment; not just existing til the next crisis is critical to our well being. I have people who ask, “What wonderful is going on in your life right now?” Some Christians are downright embarrassing. We are expected to put a “wonderful, gift of God” spin on everything from a job loss to a death of a loved one. Twitter and Facebood add to this form of Never Never Land. I want to barf for overdosing on wonderful. I’m one of the most cheerful people I know, but in life it’s just better to be genuine.
Thanks for a great article, Dr. Ablow, I find this
I found a friend from high school on Facebook, and he sent me his email address. Now we can continue our conversation away from the creepiness of Facebook. Rod Serling would have produced an episode on twitter and Facebook sooner or later, and it couldn’t be any creepier than the reality.
Social networking is just another way that our privacy is perverted in today’s world where “everyone” wants to be constantly in touch with “everyone.” It reminds me of the movie with Jim Carey about the man who didn’t know he lived inside a bubble with a TV audience watching his every move.
I believe that parents, teachers, and others give up their power too quickly by going with the so-called social networking flow. We kids said “everyone’s doing it” when I was young, but parents weren’t afraid to say NO then. Parents didn’t fear that you wouldn’t love them if they set boundaries. Each successive generation of distant parents raises even more distant kids. I see parents walking their kids in strollers and talking on the cell phone or listening to music. People walk their dogs without talking to them or patting them.
I hope that parents can join with other parents for strength of purpose, and take back their power and pride. Their kids depend on them more than they think. If parents could believe that their kids loved them, then they’d be more secure and less afraid of their kids rejecting them.
I think the need certain people have to present to the world the facade that they are somehow richer, smarter, more successful — somehow, by some terms, “better” — than they are, probably stems, like so many over-compensating behaviors, from basic emotional insecurities and feelings of worthlessness assimilated into their personalities when they were very young.
As such, my feeling is that they would have this bad self-image whether FaceBook was ever invented or not. Their inner dialogue seems to tell them that no one would ever want to befriend the “real” them and they’ll have a much better chance if they give the world the impression they’re (in the words of “Mary Poppins”) “practically perfect in every way”.
This is what happens when people start buying into impossibly high, pop-culturally driven and media-reinforced sets of standards which place physical beauty and youth on needlessly high pedestals instead of encouraging standards that attach more worth to those traits much more tangible, practical and enduring in nature: Life-experience, originality, creativity, compassion, strength of character and unshakable morality…
I am torn on this one. I was a Myspace & Facebook boycotter until I moved to Seoul South Korea when the Army transferred my family here. The distance & time zones made it easier to post photos & updates there (& cheaper). I do see the superficial aspects as a huge problem but have also been put back into contact with people I havent spoken to since we scattered as adults. Being military, we move frequently. I have a daughter who was in middle school when we moved & was devastated to leave our last base. She has actually been able to keep in touch with those friends, new friends met here, but to have one of her friends that moved from CA to Italy meet one of her friends that moved from Seoul to Italy. I think we can use the technology for good but not the ONLY way to interact with people.