I love Shimi Cohen’s brilliant video, The Innovation of Loneliness!
Although many of us may have friends on social media that number in the upper hundreds, Cohen points out that we are not actually able to have close relationships with more than roughly 150 people. This dichotomy has troubling implications as we spend more and more our social life through a device and “use technology to define ourselves.”
In 2011 I taught a reading & discussion class, in which we reviewed a variety of lengthy news features taken from mainstream publications. One week we talked about Libby Copeland’s “The Anti-Social Network: By helping other people look happy, Facebook is making us sad”. During the discussion, most of my students reported being active in social media, particularly Facebook. And although it was apparent they hadn’t thought deeply on the issue, many admitted to sharing their own feelings of being a “loser” if they didn’t match up to the images carefully crafted by their seemingly more attractive and accomplished “friends”. The collective acknowledgement of the ironically lonely feeling we get from social networking was instructive.
I suspect only a few of us genuinely feel self-actualized in that, although they haven’t done everything they want to do in life (and probably won’t), they are comfortable with who they are, what their purpose is, and have been following a perceptible trajectory to get there. The rest of us are likely too busy (I grudgingly include myself) constructing our online persona at the expense of a lived life.
Cohen is not the first person to discuss this problem, but his slick video is a powerful reminder of how easily we can lose ourselves in technology. I am somewhat guarded about my own use of social media, but I will freely admit to loving it and the potential it has to connect and inform us. It will be interesting to see how we find that balance between our real and digital selves and enjoy a life in which we feel truly connected to others.
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