( A three to four-minute read)

I suppose before I write this post I need to declare I am a Facebook user. One of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user.

Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed.

The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus.

When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors.

Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life.

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy.

The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.

We are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us.

We look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.

We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.

Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Facebook creates loneliness.

The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another.

For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

Our Internet connections are growing broader but shallower.

I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking.

WHY?

Because Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy.

Surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh.

One-click communication — the lazy click of a like. Passive consumption and broadcasting — correlates to feelings of disconnectedness.

We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible.

Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment.

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society.

We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

The effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time.

On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.

Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer. Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

Facebook capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company.

We are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are.

Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity.

We are underestimating: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

Sending out a friend request, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

It’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction that counts. Social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks.

Loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state.

The question of the future is this:

Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating.

Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

Facebook is merely a tool, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,it increases social capital. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse.

We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around.

So here is some advice:

The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society— Is it taking liberties by reminding your so called friends that your Birthday is arriving, by posting your memories, by passing your data to other servers.

A connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.

The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. 

Facebook never takes a break.

Instead of  sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in you should be using it as a signpost to what is wrong with the World.

Click the like button and Face book will log it. Make a comment and Facebook might take note.

 

 

 

 

 

 

have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely.