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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Facebooker

Jess, I was struck by the story of Demi Moore and the allegedly suicidal tweeter, too. As you so rightly point out, tweeting to a near stranger about your plans to kill yourself shows signs of disconnect, rather than connection. In this sense, I think Peggy Orenstein was onto something—even if she didn't spell it out—when she talked about a "growth through loneliness" she got to enjoy as a teenager in a pre-connected era who could discard old selves (and friends) with each new step. The irony she starts to unpack is that—according to psychologists in her piece, at least—many kids seem to find connectivity more lonely than being alone. All those "friends" reporting on their activity can make you feel even more like an isolated weirdo when you're down. 

I'm sure tons of psychologists are studying Facebook as social phenomenon. One question I have is about how Facebook plays with your sense of time. I suspect it messes with eveyone's sense of time, but perhaps it has been especially odd for those of us in our 30s and 40s who had already gone through the process of letting go of old friends when ... voilà! There they were, friending us again, flooding our news feed with their status updates about kids, husbands, wives, work, American Idol. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. I may have had a higher-than-usual dose of this of late because my mother died at Christmas, and she was the head of my middle school. So I was flooded with messages from old friends (now new "friends") about her. It was extremely reassuring at the time, I have to say: It made me feel that life has some continuity and, well, enduring connection, especially since many of these notes were about my mother's influence on their lives. But at less stressful moments, I'm sometimes shaken to glimpse a photo of an old lost kindred spirit on my feed. ... What would Anne of Green Gables have thought? The other day at brunch, a slightly older friend talked about being pulled into this same vortex, becoming almost depressed by this reminder of times past, selves left behind, there on his screen, updating away, hour after hour. It's a strange kind of connection, that's so far. Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels.

A Social Networking Cry for Help

It was big Web news on Friday when Demi Moore responded to an allegedly suicidal tweeter, who had written the actress an online message via Twitter, threatening to kill herself. Moore, along with other Twitter users, tracked the woman who wrote the message to San Jose, California, and many called the police there.* That woman is currently under psychiatric care. Today, there is another story of a suicide intervention via social networking, this time using Facebook. According to the Daily Mail, a 16-year-old boy from Oxford was chatting via Facebook with a Maryland girl when he started talking about suicide and wrote, "I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out." The Maryland girl smartly told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in D.C., who then called Scotland Yard. The police eventually found the boy, who was alive but had overdosed on pills.

All of this brings me back to an earlier point I made about Peggy Orenstein's essay on Facebook. She argued that teens today will miss out on "growth through loneliness" because they're constantly in contact with other people. For these people to make threats of suicide to virtual strangers shows a profound disconnect, rather than a feeling of satisfying interpersonal interaction. If you need Demi Moore to save you from yourself, you're a very sad person indeed.

Correction, April 6, 2009: in the original post, it was incorrectly stated that the Twitter was traced to San Diego, CA.

How To Fight Loneliness: Facebook?

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein has an essay about Facebook's impact on today's youth. Orenstein worries about two different, separate things: first, that college-age kids will find it difficult to forge new identities because of their social networking pasts, and second, that Facebook provides such a comforting connection that these members of Gen Y will lose out on "an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness."

As an older member of Generation Y, I think Peggy misses the mark a bit. While I'm certain college kids do spend a lot of their time networking socially, there's not a one-to-one correlation between their Facebook selves and their personas in real life (or IRL, as the kids say). Part of the reason Facebook is so popular is that it allows the user to control his or her experience. It truly is possible for an 18-year-old to delete their profiles or to have the wherewithal to defriend the people who made them miserable in high school. Even though they spend a lot of time on their MacBooks, I find it difficult to believe that they're not also disengaging from the computer, having late-night real-person chats with their floor mates, and experimenting with Sartre and sex, just like many college kids before them.

Which brings me to Orenstein's other point: that Facebook somehow alleviates or prevents the loneliness that many young people feel when first leaving the nest. Nothing sounds more alienating than being miserable at college and seeing Sarah's status message pop up about how she's "On her way to the Bon Iver concert with Dave." Being constantly confronted with your friends' social triumphs when you're flailing seems like it would be incredibly lonely-making. Even if your buddies are all similarly depressed or floundering in college, there's still something sterile about the clean lines and ice blue color scheme of Facebook. I find it hard to believe that it's a satisfying replacement for actual human contact, even for those born after 1990.