The internet has rescued my social hunger more than once, and for that alone I should bend a knee and give thanks to the internet god, if there is one. The first time in 1996 America Online and Africa Online (the other “AOL”) combined to allow my wife and me to communicate through email for a full year while she lived in Nairobi with three of our sons and I lived in Cincinnati with our oldest. The two AOLs may have saved our marriage that year. The more recent rescue came with COVID when high speed internet made telehealth visits and Zoom calls a lifeline for my patients, my work colleagues, our friends, and our family. I hate to think of the social starvation this pandemic would have imposed if it had struck us thirty years ago.
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Who knew when the internet first appeared which of our many social problems the internet could improve? We didn’t even know back then how to think in those terms. As Walter Isaacson has detailed in his 2014 book The Innovators, the growth of such phenomena as Facebook, Google, and Twitter dwarfed the modest hopes of most of us, and these inventions brought us, at little or no cost, access to novel connections we had not dared to imagine. More recently the smartphone has changed our social lives all over the world, even in remote villages on every continent. Social media use by teens was rare before 2010; now over 80% of US teens use social media daily. We have quite suddenly distributed a new form of social access. Imagine how our world would change if we could distribute so rapidly and widely the money needed to alleviate poverty or the food needed to solve world hunger.
So how are we doing with feeding our social appetites? A recent study suggests not so well, at least not for our teenagers around the world. This well-designed study tracked the responses of over a million teenagers in 37 countries from 2000-2018, focusing on their responses to a validated six-item measure of school loneliness in relationship to patterns of smartphone and internet use. Their main finding centered on the year 2012, the year when both smartphone use and school loneliness shot up, and kept rising for the next six years.
School loneliness rose in 36 of the 37 countries from 2012 to 2018, and the levels of reported school loneliness in 2018 were nearly twice as high as in 2012. These rising rates of loneliness were related to the rise in numbers of students who had smartphones and to the numbers of hours a day they spent on their phones, but loneliness was not related to poverty, family size, income inequalities, or unemployment—factors which have been linked to adult loneliness in other studies.
In their guest essay in the New York Times (8/1/21), the two lead authors, Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, wrote of this sharp shift in the social diets of teenagers: “…it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories.” I like that image. The hours we spend on social media leave us lonely the way donuts leave a starving teenager hungry, and scrounging for more.
What is the “nutritional” value of various kinds of social contacts for alleviating social hunger or loneliness in adults as well as adolescents—from tweets to intimate conversations, from elbow bumps to intercourse? We don’t have much hard science for such a question, but it’s worth studying now that we have some popular digital newcomers at the table. I’d like to see how the range of contact types stack up on such criteria as the amount of effort required to make the contact, the number of senses involved (sound, sight, touch, smell), the duration of the contact, the number of other people included in the contact, the emotional intensity, and the number of days a contact is remembered. How does a five-minute conversation face-to-face with your best friend compare to twenty minutes on your smartphone with your Facebook “friends”?
Where across the range of all social contacts, from intense conversations and touch at the most intimate end to texts and tweets at the other, does the “nutritional” value start to drop? And how much of our time and hopes are we investing in digital donuts that leave us lonelier?
While waiting for more science to help us understand our recent crush on our smartphones, Twenge and Haidt offer a daring first step for reducing school loneliness.Ban smartphones from schools. That sounds like a recipe for a revolution, a revolution played out on a digital platform.