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’m still planning to leave Facebook by the end of this year. I suspect I’m going to have to leave the account open — for business purposes — but that’s why I’ve set up a Facebook page just for this page, where links to what I write here can be posted. (Please follow if you’d like.) It’s not the same, though. I think it has about 35 followers, which might be a more accurate reflection of my number of real friends.

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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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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