Innovation of Loneliness

A summary of this insightful, challenging, and uncomfortable reflection can be found here. We must explore the innate connection and phenomenon between social media networks and being lonely.

Critical and deliberate thoughts about the excessive usage of social media and the current social landscape in the midst of our adolescent and young adult generation must be made. The illusion of a real relationship and being seen has been sacrificed for maintaining a digital presence.

Many new research studies are being conducted to develop understanding of the adolescent brain - that which has perpetually become riddled with distractions and other variables that detract from focus and concentration. Just as how rest is critical for the brain to synthesize information, make new connections to familiar ideas, and even form a sense of identity in the self, now researchers are identifying that teenage brains are having more difficulty focusing and engaging in meaningful tasks that require prioritization and concentrated effort.

One pediatrician wrote an article containing research that conveyed a desire to reclaim boredom from the "river of electronic screens."

Many within the American Academy of Pediatrics and other neuroscientists are getting more concerned that high-exposure time frames to internet and video screens can create a powerful effect for the young and developing brain to habituate to switching tasks and distraction, rather than focus.

Many in their adolescent and middle school experience find themselves posting comments on FaceBook, uploading personal videos on YouTube, texting multiple friends simultaneously through SnapChat and Instagram, and attempting to finish their evening homework assignments. In the current digital age of multiple media, the necessity for constant visual stimulation competes with an activated brain that has learned rest, focus, and concentration.

As with the current research findings, the human brain has more of a tendency to store emotionally and visually stimulating information rather than content material that might not be as appealing. Students that have a higher exposure to multiple media and screens maintain persistent difficulty in new patterns of thinking, problem-solving, and understanding assignments related to new activity in the brain.

Researchers recently have looked into the association between computer screen usage, video game play time, and television viewing with the impact of the quality of sleep and cognitive performance. Different studies have demonstrated that an increase of stimulation to multiple media have a negative influence on the quality of sleep, overall learning, and storage in memory. Television and computer game consumption are a powerful influence in the lives of most children and adolescents.

Previous evidence has supported the notion that media exposure could impair a variety of behavioral characteristics. Excessive television viewing and computer game playing have been associated with many psychiatric symptoms, especially emotional and behavioral symptoms, somatic complaints, attention problems such as hyperactivity, and family interaction problems.

These researchers sought to investigate the effects of singular excessive television and computer game consumption on sleep patterns and memory performance of children. Results showed that only computer game playing concluded in significant reduced amounts of slow-wave sleep as well as significant declines in verbal memory performance.

Technology and globalization in the new digital era have also contributed to the impact of college campuses in which the typical social groups of the jock and thespian are exchanged for the FaceBook addict and YouTube couch potato in the new world of texting and gaming. These terms are becoming normative and commonplace as part of the adolescent cultural narrative, and current researchers attest to the power that these evolving technologies maintain upon the development of the adolescent brain.

Ultimately, constantly switching tasks and becoming habituated to multiple media will impact sustaining attention and learning.

There is a current and new interface between psychologists and neuroscientists to better form emblematic research and create a partnership for understanding the social brain. The functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has become a brain imaging machine now being frequently used to track the functionality, flow, and activity of various parts of the brain its neural circuitry.

Current neuroscience research demonstrates that our pathways within the social brain alight and respond in sensitivity to the world at large. In essence, whenever we connect with people and have personal interface (face to face, voice to voice, skin to skin), our social brains tend to interlock.

Social interactions even demonstrate a role in re-shaping the brain through neuroplasticity, how repeated social experiences tend to shape and form the shape, size, and number of neurons and synaptic connections being made.

Certain key relationships, over time, have the potential to refashion the social brain and develop specific neural circuitry. The digital era and current shift to social media in the youth of this generation will imply having a new sense of self and personal connections.

How youth are connecting and developing social interactions will have unimagined significance; real social relationships have massive, powerful, and lifelong impact upon our thoughts and feelings and how we look at ourselves and create our sense of worth.

Understanding the role that social media plays and its connection with social anxiety are also another facet to the current dilemma of the digital age.

As one psychologist highlights:

The relatively modern phenomenon of social media and its associated technology adds a new dimension to loneliness and anxiety by offering the young person a way of directly quantifying friendships, viewing the friendship networks of others for comparison, and providing immediate information about social events. You can compare your own popularity with that of your peers, and manage that adolescent ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) by continually monitoring what’s going on socially. So it’s easy to see how technology use can take the place of more traditional social interaction and provide a yardstick for one’s popularity – or more significantly, one’s feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Many psychologists are now realizing that the general American population dropped in close confidants from 1984-2005, and have stood ground stating that the quality of an individual’s relationships, not quantity, brings definition to loneliness.

In agreement with those that are aged, the quality of relationships safeguards against social anxiety and loneliness rather than the quantity of connections being made within the social network of an individual.

For various youth in the Western Hemisphere, social media sites as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms for streaming, uploading, and posting content material can contribute to the already-existent anxieties and stressors related to social anxiety and loneliness.

Psychologists have identified that using social media as a platform to establish connectedness can in turn have the contrasting effect of creating more social connections, but they tend to be shallower and less qualitative in nature.

Youth that tend to direct their energy and zeal toward a greater social connectedness might result in reinforced feelings of loneliness and disconnectedness despite online activity.

Like many other gifts to humanity that have both positive and negative influences, today’s social media has the potential to perpetuate the modern epidemic of anxiety among adolescents and young adults.