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Teen Suicide and Social Media

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Alone in the Crowd

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People today are more connected to one another than ever before in human history, thanks to Internet-based social networking sites and text messaging. But they're also more lonely and distant from one another in their unplugged lives, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology social psychologist Sherry Turkle, PhD. This is not only changing the way we interact online, it's straining our personal relationships, as well.

Turkle's new book, "Alone Together" (Basic Books, 2011), explores the ways online social networks and texting culture are changing how people relate to society, their parents and friends.

The book is based on meta-analyses of individual and family studies and her own interviews with 300 children and 150 adults. Turkle maintains that people who choose to devote large portions of their time to connecting online are more isolated than ever in their non-virtual lives, leading to emotional disconnection, mental fatigue and anxiety.

The Monitor spoke to Turkle about her research and what it means for the Facebook generation.

How has social networking through technology changed society the most?

The most dramatic change is our ability to be "elsewhere" at any point in time, to sidestep what is difficult, what is hard in a personal interaction and go to another place where it does not have to be dealt with. So, it can be as simple as what happens when 15-year-olds gather for a birthday party. As anyone who has ever been 15 knows, there is a moment at such events when everyone wants to leave. Things get awkward. It is, however, very important that everyone stay and learn to get along with each other. These days, however, when this difficult moment comes, each 15-year-old simply retreats onto Facebook. Whether or not they physically leave the birthday party, they have "left."

When teens tell me that they'd rather text than talk, they are expressing another aspect of the new psychological affordances of the new technology - the possibility of our hiding from each other. They say a phone call reveals too much, that actual conversations don't give them enough control over what they want to say.

Does social technology isolate people from the real world, or augment our personal relationships?

Both. Some people do use social networks to keep up with real friendships, to keep them lively and up to date. There is, however, another trend in which people "friend" people they don't know or where they are unsure of the nature of their connection. We Facebook-friend people who do not know their commitment to us and similarly, we are unsure of what commitment we have to them. They can, in fact, be more like "fans" than friends. But their presence can sustain us and distract us and make it less likely for us to look beyond them to other social encounters. They can provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, without the demands of intimacy.

How does that reduced intimacy cause problems in our relationships?

We are tempted to give precedence to people we are not with over people we are with. People talk to me about their phones and laptops as the "place for hope" in their lives, the "place where sweetness comes from." We text during dinner with our families. We text as we drive. We text when we are with our children in the playground. Children say they try to make eye contact with their parents and are frustrated because their parents are looking down at their smart phones when they come out of school or after school activities. Young men talk about how only a few years ago, their dads used to watch Sunday sports with them and during the station breaks or between plays, they used to chat. Now their fathers are too often checking their email during games. The young men I interview sometimes call it "the BlackBerry zone" when they speak of their fathers' unavailability. For those who would object that it's the same as reading a Sunday paper while you watch sports, it is not. We give another level of attentional commitment to our devices.

What are some of the benefits of solitude and taking time off from technology?

It's a great psychological truth that if we don't teach our children how to be alone, they will always be lonely. When they're always connected, children, adolescents and adults become dependent on the presence of others for validation in the most basic ways. When people move from, "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text," something unfortunate happens to their relations with others. They start to need other people to feel validated and they cannot approach others as full, individual, differentiated people. Rather, other people are used, as what one might think of as part objects - spare parts to support a fragile self.

In a recent New York Times article, the founder of an online dating site (www.datemyschool.com) summed up the problem of his generation by saying that, "People in the 21st century are alone. We have so many new ways of communicating, yet we are so alone."

For young people who've never really known a world without social technology, how can you stress the importance of preserving a non-networked life?

My guarded optimism about the future comes from the young people I speak with who already complain about having to perform a character on social networks. Living on social networks means performing one's profile, and indeed multiple profiles, almost all the time. Young people complain of performance anxiety. Between performance exhaustion and the sense that they have never had their parents' full attention, young people are in fact nostalgic for something they have never had.

One of the case studies in "Alone Together" that most moved me was the case of Sanjay, a 16-year-old whom I met for an interview. During the hour we met, Sanjay had put away his phone and laptop. After the interview was over, he took it out and he had over 100 new messages, most of them texts. He explained that some of these were from a girlfriend "in meltdown," some of these were from a group of friends with whom he was starting a band.

As he collected his technology in order to begin to respond to these communications, Sanjay was clearly overwhelmed. He said, not particularly to me but more to himself, as a comment on his situation, "How long am I going to have to do this?" As we ratchet up the volume and velocity of our communication, we begin to set up a pace that takes us away from each other.

Do men and women use social networking technology differently?

In my own research, I find that men are more likely to be confrontational on social networking sites and women more likely to "stalk" (obsessively check people's status updates and learn about them) and less likely to bully or be confrontational.

One gender element that did become apparent is that mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text. Of course, in feeding an infant, so much more is going on than giving nutrition to a baby. There is the emotional exchange on the most primitive level, the feeling of gratifying someone and being gratified in return. A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely. It reminds me of something that has occurred to me often as I have done this research: Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.

Do you have any strategies for getting away from technology and nurturing real-life relationships?

I have some basic rules. I think of them as creating sacred spaces around certain activities. No technology at meals. I used to check email before my daughter came down to breakfast, but then I got into a "just let me finish this one last email before I make you breakfast" mode and she called me on it! So, no technology when I'm with my daughter or out with friends.

When my colleagues bring their phones to dinner and place them on the table, I sometimes tease them about the unlikeliness of "epistemological emergencies." The idea that we should put each other on pause as though we were machines in order to attend to those who are not present has become commonplace. It needs to be examined. I don't think that is how we want to treat each other.

Also, no technology when I'm taking time for myself in nature. I have a house on Cape Cod and I notice people walk the dunes with their eyes down, looking at their smart phones. I think it is important to teach the next generation the importance of walking in nature, and in the city, and focusing on those experiences. I am concerned about our losing touch with the realities of our physical surroundings. I am concerned about our losing touch with the kind of solitude that refreshes and restores.

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People today are more connected to one another than ever before in human history, thanks to Internet-based social networking sites and text messaging. But they're also more lonely and distant from one another in their unplugged lives, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology social psychologist Sherry Turkle, PhD.

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Loneliness in Three Countries

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Are Social Network Sites Good for Society

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Negative and Positive Effects of Social Me

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Young Adults Need to be More Interactive

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Texting can be Positive

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Newsela | Texting can be a positive and powerful force, experts say

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Experts said texting can improve interpersonal relationships, and help people deal with traumatic events.

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"Smart Generation" has Harsh Outlook on the World

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Is Technology Killing Our Friendships?

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Feeling Lonely? Too Much Time On Social Media May Be Why

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It’s not clear whether spending a lot of time on Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram leads to social isolation, or whether the lonely seek solace in social media.

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by Margie Warrell

As social media reshapes how we connect, we have to rethink what we need to feel fulfilled in our relationships, and realize that no amount of tweets, texts or Facebook status updates can provide it. While social networking is a great tool, there's a profound difference between an online social network and a real one. Despite the fact there will always be someone, somewhere awake to "like" our latest status update - however witty or banal it may be - when it comes to friends, quantity doesn't equal quality.

Recent studies have found that despite being more connected than ever, more people feel more alone than ever. Surprisingly, those who report feeling most alone, are those you'd expect it from least: young people under 35 who are the most prolific social networkers of all. Another recent study found that 48% of respondents only had one confidant compared to a similar study 25 years ago when people said they had about three people they could confide in. So as we have built expansive social networks online, the depth of our networks offline has decreased. So it seems that because technology makes it easier to stay in touch while keeping distance, more and more people find themselves feeling distant and never touching. Or at least not enough to avoid us feeling increasingly alone.

As I wrote in Find Your Courage, human beings crave intimacy. Neurobiologists have found we are wired for it. Yet genuine intimacy demands vulnerability and vulnerability requires courage. It requires that we lay down the masks we can so easily hide behind online, and reveal all of who we are with others - the good, the bad and the sometimes not so (photo-shopped) pretty.

Social media allows us to control what we share. It appeals to our vulnerability and vanity. We can pick and choose which photos we share and craftily edit our words to ensure we convey the image we want others to see. Yet it also provides the illusion of friendship that, in real life, may be shallow, superficial and unable to stand the demands, and pressures genuine friendships entail.

Digital communication can never replace in person, face-to-face, contact in building relationships - personal and professional. As a study by Harvard Business Review found, team performance went up 50% when teams socialized more and limited email for more operational only issues. But whether loneliness leads people to the Internet, or the internet to loneliness, it seems that many of us turn to the internet to avoid simply being with ourselves. As Sherri Turkle author of Alone Together wrote, until we learn how to be okay with solitude, we are not going to be able to connect deeply with others. Social networking provides a means of escaping confronting aspects of ourselves and our lives we wish were different, better, more glamorous and less mundane. It's an all too convenient tool for avoiding sometimes harsh realities and playing pretend (to ourselves and others) with our life. Online websites promise avatars that will allow us to love our bodies, love our lives, and find the true romance we dream of. But at what cost to the real life (marriage, body, friendships) we have to face when we close our computer down? Even the most brilliant and mesmerizing avatars cannot compensate for what is missing in real life.

Don't get me wrong; online technology is not some "necessary evil." Far from it. It's a magnificent tool for staying in touch with people across miles, time zones and years. We've all witnessed it's power in rallying people behind noble causes (think KONY 2012), overthrow governments (as we saw in the Arab Spring last year), enable people in isolated corners of the globe to plug into resources and information they could never otherwise access (think North Korea), and provide opportunity to conduct business more efficiently than ever before. But like all tools, we have to learn how to use it well, and not let it use us. We cannot become dependent on it to do things it simply cannot do - like fulfill our deep innate need for intimacy, genuine connection and real friendship. All needs which can only be fulfilled through sometimes-uncomfortable conversations, in which we share openly what is happening to us and engage authentically with what is going on for others.

As we rely on technology to communicate more efficiently in an increasingly global world, we mustn't lose tough with the physical community around us or forget that human element within any relationship can never be replaced by technology. The more we rely on technology in our lives the more mindful we must be to turn it off and spend time with people, without our gadgets beeping at us to return texts that really, aren't worth our time to reply to. While it might be stating the obvious, if you want to connect with people more, you need to be in converse with people more - openly, authentically and with a vulnerability that may sometimes make you uncomfortable.

7 STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING A REAL SOCIAL NETWORK:

1. Unplug: Turn off your computer, put down your iPhone, step away from your iPad, and take time to engage with people, in person, with face-to-face communication. A night at home with 500 of your FB friends can never compare with an evening out with five friends, or even one friend. If you can't connect face-to-face at least switch off the computer and pick up the phone for a meaningful conversation, rather than a series of cryptic texts or tweets. Fifty text messages over a day can never compare with just five minutes of open, caring and honest conversation.

2. Become a better listener: Too often we talk to much and listen too little. Learn to listen well and be okay with yours and others stumbles. We can't edit real conversation and we don't want to. It's when we hesitate, stumble on our words or simply find ourselves sitting in silence without any words that we reveal ourselves to others and connect most deeply. As I've said before we connect to others through our vulnerabilities, not through our brilliance.

3. Engage in your community: Get involved in your local community or neighborhood. Join the local tennis club, or volunteer to help clean up the local park or spend some helping at a local service organization.

4. Practice Conversation: If you are out of practice at meeting people take small steps. Make the most of all chances for social contact, whether it's speaking to the local greengrocer or responding to a fellow bus passenger who strikes up a conversation. For some people, just making eye contact can be difficult. So it may be that you have to begin with just that.

5. Find Like Minds: Join a class or find an interest group. Getting to know new people can be part of the learning process in a new class. Whether you enjoy winetasting, water painting. Bush walking or going to the movies, there's bound to be an interest group in your area where you can meet like-minded people.

6. Reconnect with long lost friends: Pick up the phone and call an old friend who you have lost touch with. See if they'd like to catch up for coffee. It's very likely they will be delighted to hear from you, and will enjoy reconnecting every bit as much as you (assuming your friendship didn't end badly)

7. Invite people over: Many people are intimidated by the idea of inviting people over for dinner, or ever a coffee. But some of the best conversations happen over a coffee or casual meal. Yes it may be a bit scary, but real connection will always demand a degree of risk and vulnerability. Then again, what worthwhile endeavor doesn't?
Margie Warrell
is a bestselling author, executive life coach, media personality, and frequent keynote speaker who empowers women globally to live and lead more courageously. Author of Find Your Courage: 12 Acts for Becoming Fearless in Work and in Life ( McGraw-Hill), Margie is a regular commentator and media guest on major television networks. To receive her free LIVE BOLDLY! Newsletter, or to learn about other programs that support your living more courageously, please visit www.margiewarrell.com. See her Forbes profile.

Featured by WomensMedia, Expert Advice for Business Women

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Text or Talk: Is Technology Making You Lonely?

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by Margie Warrell As social media reshapes how we connect, we have to rethink what we need to feel fulfilled in our relationships, and realize that no amount of tweets, texts or Facebook status updates can provide it. While social networking is a great tool, there's a profound difference between an online [...]

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Are teens making friends around the world, or blowing off IRL relationships?