Hooray for Social Media

IT-based social media—texting, Facebook, Twitter—present the exciting possibility of greater interpersonal connectedness.  This is quite a shift from from the olden days when we worried about the futures of isolated teens hunched over their desktops.  We wondered: Would Gen X-ers becoming pale-skinned zombies whose best friends were machines?  Then along came Facebook and its kin, full of possibilities for connecting and reconnecting with families and friends not only through messaging, but also photos and newsfeeds.  Not to say that it's all good.  Each tech advance presents its own dark scenarios.  The current favorite is the mutually parasitic cyborg of adolescent and smartphone.  Parents might wish she would give her thumbs a rest and re-enter the real world of face-to-face communication.  But on the whole the affordances of social media are to the good.  A remarkably strong correlate of happiness is social connectedness; conversely, depressed people often feel deep isolation.  I don't believe that Facebook is an answer to threats of loneliness, but even if it adds only incrementally to a sense that we have a place in the world, I have to believe that is a good thing—and even more so if it facilitates communication with long-lost friends.  Through such reconnections, we can feel our own biographical depth and continuity, which adds further value to a sense of identity and belonging in a world where feelings of anonymity and aloneness are all too common.