Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

In Still Connected (2011), the sociologist Claude Fischer reviewed forty years of surveys that asked people about their social relationships. “The most striking thing about the data,” he noted, “is how consistent Americans’ ties to family and friends were between the 1970s and 2000s. We rarely find differences of more than a handful of percentage points either way that might describe lasting alterations in behavior with lasting personal consequences—yes, Americans entertained less at home and did more phone calling and emailing, but they did not change much on the fundamentals.”⁴⁵ Though people have reallocated their time because families are smaller, more people are single, and more women work, Americans today spend as much time with relatives, have the same median number of friends and see them about as often, report as much emotional support, and remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as their counterparts in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days. Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends (though a bit less face-to-face contact), and they feel that the electronic ties have enriched their relationships. Fischer concluded that human nature rules: “People try to adapt to changing circumstances so as to protect their most highly valued ends, which include sustaining the volume and quality of their personal relationships—time with children, contact with relatives, a few sources of intimate support.”⁴⁶

What about subjective feelings of loneliness? Surveys of the entire population are sparse; the data Fischer found suggested that “Americans’ expressions of loneliness remained the same or perhaps increased slightly,” mainly because more people were single.⁴⁷ But surveys of students, a captive audience, are plentiful, and for decades they have indicated whether they agree with statements like “I am unhappy doing so many things alone” and “I have nobody to talk to.” The trends are summarized in the title of a 2015 article, “Declining Loneliness over Time,” and are shown in figure 18-2.

Since these students were not tracked after they left school, we don’t know whether the decline in loneliness is a period effect, in which it has become steadily easier for young people to satisfy their social needs, or a cohort effect, in which recent generations are more socially satisfied and will remain so. What we do know is that young Americans are not suffering from “toxic levels of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.”

Together with “the kids today,” the perennial target of cultural pessimists is technology. In 2015 the sociologist Keith Hampton and his coauthors introduced a report on the psychological effects of social media by noting:

For generations, commentators have worried about the impact of technology on people’s stress. Trains and industrial machinery were seen as noisy disruptors of pastoral village life that put people on edge. Telephones interrupted quiet times in homes. Watches and clocks added to the dehumanizing time pressures on factory workers to be productive. Radio and television were organized around the advertising that enabled modern consumer culture and heightened people’s status anxieties.⁴⁸

Figure 18-2: Loneliness, US students, 1978–2011

Source: Clark, Loxton, & Tobin 2015. College students (left axis): Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, trend line across many samples, taken from their fig. 1. High school students (right axis): Mean rating of six loneliness items from the Monitoring the Future survey, triennial means, taken from their fig. 4. Each axis spans half a standard deviation, so the slopes of the college and high school curves are commensurable, but their relative heights are not.

And so it was inevitable that the critics would shift their focus to social media. But social media can be neither credited nor blamed for the changes in loneliness among American students shown in figure 18-2: the decline proceeded from 1977 through 2009, and the Facebook explosion did not come until 2006. Nor, according to the new surveys, have adults become isolated because of social media. Users of social media have more close friends, express more trust in people, feel more supported, and are more politically involved.⁴⁹ And notwithstanding the rumor that they are drawn into an anxious competition to keep up with the furious rate of enjoyable activities of their digital faux-friends, social media users do not report higher levels of stress than non-users.⁵⁰ On the contrary, the women among them are less stressed, with one telling exception: they get upset when they learn that someone they care about has suffered an illness, a death in the family, or some other setback. Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes.