Social media creates shallow ties at expense of deeper connections

By David McElroy · September 16, 2020

How many friends do you have? Do you have any idea anymore? Or do you even know what the word “friend” means now?

I ran across a discussion earlier today among funeral directors about how many people typically attend funerals. Although they all knew of some large and showy funerals, most were more familiar with the ones at which few people showed up.

One guy said that 10 to 15 people was typical for him. Another thought it might be closer to 40. But the numbers were shockingly small, except in cases of large, close-knit families with a lot of local relatives.

How many Facebook “friends” do you have? It’s bothered me for years that the folks at the company use that word, because their idea of friends is very different than mine. At one point, I had 5,000 Facebook “friends” — which is the limit for a personal account — and even after aggressively deleting and blocking people for years, I still have about 500.

But how many of those people are really my friends? How many would show up at my funeral?

When social media first became popular, I didn’t see the point. I finally set up a MySpace page. (Remember those?) But it seemed pointless and I wrote off the idea. Then an ex-girlfriend wanted me to sign up for Facebook about 12 or 13 years ago. I didn’t see the point, but I did it to make her happy.

And Facebook send me down a social media rabbit hole that leaves me liking human beings less and less every day.

I’ve come to hate social media. I never got attached to Twitter. (It’s hard for me to say anything briefly enough to fit into a tweet.) I have a couple of Instagram accounts — which you might have seen here — but I don’t have any great attachment to that. I post my photos and “like” a few other people’s pictures, but it’s not a big deal.

Facebook has been the most dangerous to me. When I had allowed myself to build a huge Facebook following, it allowed me to “perform” for others and get attention which felt good to my ego but which was dangerous to something else inside me. (I wrote about this one time.)

I’ve actually made some real friends on Facebook. I’ve met a few people in “real life” who I wouldn’t have met otherwise. But I mostly have the veneer of friendship with most of these people. I know their names and I know some surface facts about them, but when I think about it seriously, I realize that I don’t know much about what’s real in most of them. And hardly any of them know much that’s real inside me.

I fear that we are allowing social media to create more and more ties to more and more people, but at the expense of the closer and deeper relationships which we used to have with people who we talked with and spent time with in person.

There was a time when I assumed that the social media relationships we developed would be in addition to our real-life friendships, but I sense that the time we spend online — and the sense of shallow connection we have there — is actually taking away from the time and emotional energy which should go to people in our real lives.

Social media does the same thing with information. It lets us have shallow contact with lots and lots of information and subjects that we wouldn’t have touched upon 30 years ago, but we don’t take long-term deep dives into as many specific things as we might have before. The result is that we know just enough to be dangerous — enough to make us believe we know more than we do — about a lot of things.

That means that most people have opinions about things they are absolutely unqualified to have opinions about — because they’ve seen their friends post some shallow “memes” on the subjects.

Facebook might claim I have 500 friends — and it might have once claimed I had 5,000 friends — but I don’t. Not real friends. That is an illusion.

I don’t want to live a shallow life. I don’t want shallow relationships. I don’t want to have a shallow understanding of a million things.

I’d like to choose the people who matter to me and invest more time and effort in them. I’d like to stop spreading my attention so broadly and focus on subjects that actually matter to me — and ignore the people who are having useless political and social squabbles, for example.

I know it’s hard for most people to conceive of modern life without social media, but I think more and more of us are going to have to reject it as the unhealthy thing that it is. And we have to quit thinking that the problem is Facebook or Twitter or any specific company. The problem is the medium itself.

We need to reconnect with “real life.” We need to narrow our focus to the people who matter most to us and the few things that really matter to us. In order to do that, we’re going to have to break our social media addiction.

I suspect more people will be at my funeral one day if I invest a lot of serious time in a few people — instead of having shallow and weak connections to a lot of people who wouldn’t notice if I died.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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