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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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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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For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to Sam. In 2009, I took in a young feral cat who I named for the early American revolutionary Samuel Adams. He was one of the most confident — downright arrogant, in fact — cats I’ve ever been around. He had an amazing personality and I immediately loved him. He was no more than 8 or 9 months old when he suddenly died for reasons that my vet couldn’t explain. Even though I had him only a short time, he was one of my all-time favorites. #tbt #cats #tabby #feral #birmingham #alabama
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Except when he’s asleep, Thomas always looks as Except when he’s asleep, Thomas always looks as though he’s on high alert and ready to run away from danger. His feral early years still dominate his internal programming. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #tabby #tabbycat #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
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My favorite photos of Merlin tend to be those — My favorite photos of Merlin tend to be those — such as this one — in which he seems to be contemplating difficult issues. Feline philosophy or quantum physics or something else that he figures I wouldn’t understand. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #merlin2024 #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama #caturday
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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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