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Longitudinal data would be informative. I strongly suspect people spent less time alone in the past. (Note: The X-axis is age.) My theories: * Multitude of
by nopinsight 9y ago
Longitudinal data would be informative. I strongly suspect people spent less time alone in the past.
(Note: The X-axis is age.)
My theories:
* Multitude of choices given to us by technology have led to fewer things we pay attention to in common with our friends and neighbors. Thus, fewer shared loci of interaction. Career specialization is another key contributing factor.
* More recently, dopamine rush generated by endless new contents tailored to our preferences has made real-world interactions and activities dull by comparison. More people choose to spend time alone with that rush. In the long run, it might result in weaker social ties and less healthy psychology for some/many people.
Research has shown that strong social ties are important for mental and even physical health.
How do we design technologies and social institutions to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoI'm not convinced by your argument with regard to the multitude of choices. A counter point could be that we should be more likely to have at least something in common with more people. Somebody must be consuming mass-media, problem the masses. I think a better theory to support your point is that we tend to be less religious and therefore less community oriented. I don't really know if that holds up though. We have to be careful about romanticising the past, so yes longitudinal data and cultural comparisons would make these data more informative. > How do we design technologies to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems? Isn't the answer to this "Social Networks"? The market has spoken, Facebook is King. Every time there's conversations about the ills of Facebook there's always people pointing out that Facebook makes organising events a lot easier. That's definitely something I miss since getting off Facebook and moving to a new city.
- brightball 9y agoFwiw, when I got off of Facebook my family decided to explore local churches and found one that has been great. We've made about the same amount of friends there in 6 months that we did living here for 13 years without going there. Plenty of activities too. When I was on Facebook I found that I was spending significantly more time chatting it up with my friends from college who are all over the country. Not that I don't want to keep in touch with them, but I'd rather be more social with people I can do things with. Facebook gives you a social crutch. You have to get rid of it and create that gap to feel the need to fill it with something else.
- icebraining 9y agoWhat kind of activities does your church organize?
- brightball 9y agoSocially, the church itself doesn't do anything other than a big BBQ every year. Other than that the churchwide events are all very much on-mission (mission trips, charity work, youth activities). Sunday school classes tend to be where the social aspects come from. We'll do a day at the lake or a get together for a meal and some activity. We've gotten together with one or two other couples to get dinner and do an escape room, shoot targets at a guys farm, gotten the kids together to play. Even got invited to a dueling piano bar, which caught me by surprise since I assumed that would be frowned on. Turns out most grown adults are perfectly content to go have a drink, just not many.
- nopinsight 9y agoMy theory assumes as a presupposition that people are only likely to travel a certain distance to see others, since time is a scarce and non-renewable resource. If interests are fragmented, the number of people we both share interests with and are friends with within a given radius becomes smaller. Facebook might help a bit for organizing events and maintaining existing ties but it also contributes to the dopamine rush above. Some sort of ways to connect new people with one another within a local area could be helpful. I found Meetup interesting and useful but could be improved upon. I used to attend some events organized by WeWork and those felt more energized but still no real friendships emerged. The only thing that really helped make new long-term friends for me was sharing a co-working space with people who had some interests in common.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hanoz 9y agoFacebook makes events easier to organise if you're happy to organise events which only Facebook members are invited to.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoBecause to view any Facebook event page you must agree to a Nondisclosure Agreement that restricts you from revealing the particulars of the event to people who do not have Facebook accounts.
- throwanem 9y agoBecause there's so much more friction involved in including people who don't have Facebook accounts that, eventually, you just stop bothering to do it.
- jessaustin 9y agoYes my last high school reunion was like that. (i.e., people who weren't on facebook weren't invited, even if they were known in the community and available at phone numbers advertised to the public.) Their loss!
- majewsky 9y agoI wonder if that is why I didn't hear of any high-school reunion yet. Last year was my 10th anniversary of graduation. (Although, it might just be that reunions are not as common in Germany. Maybe noone bothered to put one up.)
- throwanem 9y ago> Their loss! Miss a couple weddings that way and see if you feel the same.
- laughfactory 9y agoMy wife and I hate Facebook and aren't on it; and yeah, we sometimes get miffed when people assume everyone who matters (or close enough) is on it, and use only it for communicating with family, friends, a social club, or whatever. We're the kind of people who are _proudly_ not on Facebook, and not at all shy about it. The only social network worth a damn is LinkedIn, and only so long as they are useful in finding work.
- mau013 9y agoI think that your theory is not accounting for how ageing will change the way you interact/adopt technology. Looking at the "old" edge of the charts from a youngish perspective might miss some important drivers of how older people view the world...
- suneilp 9y agoA gender breakdown for both single and married would also be useful. For marriages there should also be another dimension based on the health of the marriage. Recent literature suggests that men are lonelier than women which incites my curiosity on gender differences in this topic. I've been theorizing that if true, those men who fall further below the envelope of social interaction end up having greater difficulty in developing and maintaining relationships as they age.
- dajohnson89 9y agoIf you have any sources on men being lonelier, please share here and I'd be very grateful
- sien 9y agoHere is one source: http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/assets/documents/hilda-bibliography/working-discussion-research-papers/2005/Flood_Loneliness-in-Australia.pdf http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/assets/documents/hi... Basically men tend to have fewer friends than women and depend more on their spouses for this.
- ionised 9y agoMy experience seems to be the opposite. I have friends and see them regularly and my partner ignores hers for the most part.
- gaius 9y agoWell, there is the societal expectation that in order to "grow up" a man must stop spending time with his friends and/or on his hobbies and "settle down". There is no such expectation/pressure on women.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
- XorNot 9y agoYou declare you want more data but on what are you basing your suspicions but ... I suspect not even anecdotes.
- nopinsight 9y agoSome data from an interview with Prof. John Cacioppo, the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009) http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epi... "I’ve seen studies that suggest the percentage of Americans who report chronic feelings of loneliness has risen over the past few decades. Looking from a few different sources of data, it seems that way. The percentage of Americans who responded that they regularly or frequently felt lonely was between 11% and 20% in the 1970s and 1980s [the percentage varied depending on the study]. In 2010, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) did a nationally representative study in 2010 and found it was closer to 40% to 45%. And a recent study done on older adults out of University of California - San Francisco put it at 43%. In our own longitudinal studies, we’ve seen it at about 26% and longitudinal studies in Europe have found around the same thing; there could be mathematical reasons for why it’s lower in longitudinal studies than in cross-sectional studies ones. So loneliness levels are on the rise, we’re just not sure by how much. Why do you think this is the case? We aren’t as closely bound. We no longer live in the same village for generations, which means we don’t have the same generational connections. That releases social constraints—relationships are formed and replaced more easily today. We have Tinder, Match, eHarmony and all these kinds of places you can dial up and find friendships, connections and opportunities that didn’t exist. In the last 15 years or so, many of those face-to-face connections have been replaced with social networking. We’ve found that if you use social networking as a way to promote face-to-face conversation, it lowers loneliness. But if you use a destination, as a replacement for the face-to-face, it increases loneliness." Interestingly, a paper found evidence for declining loneliness among American college and high school students. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25422313 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25422313 If I need to guess I'd say that online social networking may promote face-to-face socialization among students, while it is often used as a replacement for in-person interactions among older adults.
- icebraining 9y agoWe aren’t as closely bound. We no longer live in the same village for generations, which means we don’t have the same generational connections. That's true over longer time periods, but Americans are moving much less than in previous decades. Of course, it might be that the lonely people today were the movers of the 70s/80s.
- opo 9y ago>...I strongly suspect people spent less time alone in the past. Yea, a book that overs this is: "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu...