Things like Facebook have made you feel as though you're connected to everybody. You've got a thousand friends on Facebook, but you don't actually talk to anybody. You're not close to anybody.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We live in a world where many of us have a lot of friends on Facebook but yet we have lost human connection.
I don't have many friends; I'm very much a loner. As a child I was very isolated, and I've never been really close to anyone.
We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or 6 real friends.
I'm not even on Facebook. I've got enough friends I never see. You know how you have a lot of friends you never call? I don't have time for new friends, and I don't want to be friends with someone only online.
Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.
Facebook isn't helping you make new connections, Facebook doesn't develop new relationships, Facebook is just trying to be the most accurate model of your social graph. There's a part of me that feels somewhat bored by all of this.
I gotta tell you, I don't have many close friends, and if I do wind up making friends with somebody, it takes me a long time, usually.
Millions of years ago, our brains became wired to remember about 150 people as 'close friends.'
Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.
I don't do Facebook and I don't do Twitter, and already I notice that, with some of my friends, there's a whole sphere of conversation that I'm completely on the outside of, and that's my choice. But, to a greater extent, that's what the whole of life is like.