I feel fundamentally different from this author about what the Internet is doing to my interpersonal relationships, but she makes some good points. I like Facebook very well because, duh, my friends are there. I have lived overseas back in the era when I couldn't possibly afford regular international telephone calls, and relying on aerograms (remember those?)[1] to communicate by postal mail meant a rather slow response time to anything I said to old friends back home.
After living overseas twice in my life (two separate three-year stays), I now live in the same metropolitan community where I grew up, as the author didn't when she had the experiences that shaped her opinion. ("My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends.") Some of the people I interact with online have known me since almost fifty (!) years ago, a few of them continually over all that while. Those friends who are still in this town I see in person once in a while, but I hear a lot more of their news in between face-meeting through online communication.
Because I've lived in more than one country, and some of my classmates and colleagues and one child have scattered hither and yon, there isn't anywhere on the planet where I can face-meet with all the people I like at the same time, but my second stay overseas (1998-2001) illustrated the power of the Internet to reduce feelings of loneliness and lack of connection while far away from most familiar friends, and helped me learn how to use online networks to enhance real-world friendships. These days, Facebook comes pretty close to being with all my friends all the time, and I like that. I come here on Hacker News, of course, pretty often, and here I can sometimes make a new kind of friend over shared interests.
I am torn. On one hand, social media has absolutely brought me closer to my family. My family is scattered between Bangladesh, Australia, Canada, and Germany, while my wife's is in Oregon and Washington. Nobody is close to where we live in D.C. But they can all watch my daughter grow up on Facebook.
On the other hand, it's hard to have deep relationships over social media. Tweeting and like-ing are pretty superficial. I feel like the internet has regressed in a way. My late-night conversations over AIM were a lot more meaningful than any interaction I've had over Facebook. Yeah, there's FB Messenger, but it doesn't seem as pervasive or as convenient as AIM was back in the day.
For me part of what makes the interactions subpar now is that one or more parties is participating via mobile devices and input on mobile is borked. I am overly eager to be brief since typing on the mobile is so painful. This makes it difficult to have nuanced conversations.
I think you hit the nail on the head. My two best college friends and I are all separated now but keep almost daily intellectual communication via gchat. I have to use my phone tho as I work for R&D for a big corp and chat is blocked.
It's aggravating. But then later when I can continue a conversation via keyboard the depth and intimacy is much greater.
Maybe as speech to text improves it'll get better.
Did the AIM convos happen when you were a teenager? My FB chat's aren't like my MSN days, but it's the difference between my teen years and my mid twenties (today), not a difference in tech. I still chat my ass off with good friends on FB, very similar to my MSN days.
Meanwhile I haven't put anything on my wall since 2012. I literally use FB messenger to just send my best friends any stories or pictures I want to share with them. The other 250... they're more like colleagues to me than part of an intimate circle. Which is why my wall is so empty.
How everyone else does it (posting general stuff on their wall) is beyond me, I feel like an alien. For example someone I hung out with in Korea just posted: "Colorado we about to be all up inside of u".
He's probably going to take a trip to Colorado. Why he wants to share that with his 1800 friends is beyond me. That's the type of stuff I'd send a few of my friends, it's just not relevant to anyone else. Didn't even spark a conversation or anything either. I'd feel like a giant asshole posting stuff like that every day. HN is a world of difference, it's literally the reason I'm on here.
Twitter is a mixed-bag for me. Thing is I don't follow friends or semi-friends on twitter. Mostly just industry/professional/journalists I want to stay up to date on. So it's usually a feed of highly relevant bits of information, so I quite like twitter. The other side of twitter (people who tweet with their friends) feels like teenage MSN chats, only less coherent, less conversational, more one-liner, and of course, permanent so I stay away from that.
I mean imagine you're in a bar or on a bus with your friends just talking about whatever, and you gave everyone in the bar or on the bus a little device with which they can read every single line of the conversation you're having. I'd be the weirdest thing in the world, extremely awkward, there'd be no privacy and it'd be completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. But somehow some people use twitter like that, posting public permanent random conversations that you'd normally (in the real world) expect to have privately, instead of using PMs or Private Group Chat.
That extends to things like 'liking'. If I like a new book, I want to share that with my brother who reads a lot. I really don't care for a guy I had class with last year to see that. Say you're in a store and you see a nice shirt, would anyone send a letter to 250 of his friends about that? But some people treat FB likes like that. It's really weird to me. Also one of those things I'll PM a few of my friends.
I never used AIM but I always use Steam chat for talking with friends every day. Since we're always on Steam it's easy to talk to someone. Sometimes long conversations, usually just small bits of banter
I'd agree with you. The mistake often made is mistaking Facebook interactions with real social interactions.
Through social media I can keep in touch with friends from all over the world. Then, if they happen to be visiting or I'm nearby, catching up is easily arranged and not at all awkward because of the information flow in the meantime.
If someone is lacking in social interactions, perhaps social media might be the surface area where that appears, but it's not necessarily a cause or even aggravating factor. I think being alone in a city without any friends would be worse without a connection back to a social circle you do feel comfortable with. I feel like there is an unrealistic expectation placed on social media here.
After living overseas twice in my life (two separate three-year stays), I now live in the same metropolitan community where I grew up, as the author didn't when she had the experiences that shaped her opinion. ("My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends.") Some of the people I interact with online have known me since almost fifty (!) years ago, a few of them continually over all that while. Those friends who are still in this town I see in person once in a while, but I hear a lot more of their news in between face-meeting through online communication.
Because I've lived in more than one country, and some of my classmates and colleagues and one child have scattered hither and yon, there isn't anywhere on the planet where I can face-meet with all the people I like at the same time, but my second stay overseas (1998-2001) illustrated the power of the Internet to reduce feelings of loneliness and lack of connection while far away from most familiar friends, and helped me learn how to use online networks to enhance real-world friendships. These days, Facebook comes pretty close to being with all my friends all the time, and I like that. I come here on Hacker News, of course, pretty often, and here I can sometimes make a new kind of friend over shared interests.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogram