Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Brittany Barnier Composition 2 January 29, 2013 Keeping in Touch or an Unhealthy Addiction? In this article “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? ” the author, Stephen Marche starts off with an intention grabbing story that made headlines about a lady named Yvette Vickers. She was a former playboy playmate and a b-list movie star. She also was known for being found dead in what he described as in a mummified state, lying next to her heater, but her heater was not the only thing near her that was still running.
Even after not being found over a year after her death, which was not the only thing that caught the attention of Mr. Marche. When Vickers’ neighbor found her dead her computer was still on and glowing and lighting up the dark and empty room. After searching her phone records, it was proven that even months before her death there were no phone calls to family or relatives, but shockingly only to distant fans that had only knew her from fan conventions or some internet sites that she was registered to.
Even though she did not have any children, or any close circle of any kind, only a couple of weeks within her what they believe was a “lonesome” death there were already 16,057 Facebook posts and over 884 tweets on Twitter. Mr. Marche used this story bring up the question if Social media such as Facebook and Twitter could be the cause of lonely. Even with all of the connectivity these are supposed to bring us, research shows that we have never been lonelier. Marche expressed, “Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us.

We are doing it to ourselves. ” An example that he used in the article was going to self-checkout versus a normal check stand at a grocery store. He even admitted himself to going to the self-checkout, only to avoid wait time and because it is more efficient. Marche isn’t trying to bring loneliness upon himself, he is only trying to “Bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself”. Is lonely a bad thing? The social network is supposed to be used for people to be connected to each other, but it relies on them to use it like it is supposed to be used and use it to improve themselves instead of becoming lonely.
The author stated that one shouldn’t cast the blame of loneliness on the technology itself, because at some point, the technology does help in improving the lifestyle in this current modernize world. According to a study, 35 percent of adults older than 45 are chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. Everyone experiences loneliness after a certain amount of time with or without social networking; it just comes naturally with life. Instead of relying on talking to friends or hanging out with them to catch up, people rely on Facebook and are constantly checking and it and are also on it.
What people don’t realize is that Facebook can be very addictive for some people. No one ever realizes that too much of a good thing could be bad such as Facebook has led to having no sense of time and even not being aware of time passing. Facebook mostly appeals to human needs and mostly users that like interactions with playing online games, it makes people lose their reality of the real world and focusing on the fantasy world on Facebook and especially focusing mostly with facing life problems and issues online, rather than living life outside of the internet.
It is really a bad influence, because it attracts a lot of users’ attention to it and that leads to losing sense of time which is spending many countless of hours online and on many other social networks. Being lonely is not always a bad thing but never having that face to face contact, or even decrease in confidence is a horrible way to spend your life.
By everyone having a Facebook there are constantly people bloating about how happy they are with their lives or how good they are doing and by doing so everyone who is reading that is now thinking how they aren’t that happy so therefore their life must suck. This is what is causing people to be depressed and very unhappy with their life. We need that physical contact with other human beings, it may not be Facebook as the direct link to us being lonely or unhappy but it definitely only helps us isolate ourselves from everyone.