Stephen Marche's Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

The idea of needing social networking sites to connect with everyone else knows or may meet have become embedded in American culture throughout recent years, especially among the teenage population. Facebook is easily one of the most popular sites, to the point where it would be considered unusual for someone attending high school to not have a profile on the site. However, does Facebook actually create a stronger connection between people, or does it simply creates the illusion of a healthy social life, while really creating distances a distance between them? Facebook can function as a placebo for some users in the place of genuine, healthy social life. Users with massive amounts of Facebook friends, but sub-par social lives can become pre-occupied

One’s amount of Facebook reflects how popular one wish to appear online more than how healthy one’s friendship truly is. Constant usage of Facebook allows user to potentially feel like they have a meaningful social life, when in reality, they are missing something. In Stephen Marche’s 2102 article, “Is Facebook making Us Lonely?” he notes that Facebook was introduced to the world in the midst of spreading and intensifying loneliness, an idea to which he greatly attributes Facebook’s appeal and success (Marche 26). Initially, social networking sites seem to be evidence of modern-day social interaction being easier and more convenient than ever. However, they can just as easily convince users that they are missing out on having a social life. Marche quotes a woman named Moira Burke, who has conducted studies on Facebook interaction (34). Bruke claims that the way in which the site is used is the greatest factor in determining if it increases the loneliness of users or not, stressing the importance of actually communicating with people one knows personally instead of posting about one’s own activities or simply clicking “like” on the others’ posts. If a Facebook user simply sits back and watches the activity of others without interacting with them in any way referred to by Burke as “one-click communication” and “passive consumption”, it could result in feelings of

In fact, Facebook has become such a factor in a teenage relationship in recent years that the “Facebook official’ has become relevant, referencing the act of a couple mutually verifying and displaying their relationship status on the site. The phrase itself suggests that modern-day relationship between partners who both have Facebook profiles requires confirmation for everyone on their friend list to see, an idea that would have seemed risible to anyone in a relationship before the rise of Facebook. This phrase is referenced in the title of the article Are We Facebook Official? Implication of dating Partners’ Facebook Use and Profiles for Intimate Relationship Satisfaction”, and play a major role in the text of the article itself (Papp, Danielewicz, & Cayemberg 86).The article focuses on a study meant to discover the effect of Facebook on couples, primarily by testing the importance of how couples displayed their relationship status over the site (87). The results of the study varied between the two genders, but seemed to suggest that the way in which partners in relationships display their status could have a direct connection to how satisfied at least one partner was in their relationship (88). The fact that simply having a name displayed along with a partner’s on the internet can have an actual effect on something as