Are social media connecting us or are they making us even lonelier?

Throughout the last decades, our ability to connect with people around the world has exploded. The internet has allowed us to join groups and to chat with our friends around the planet. Thanks to the internet we have more opportunities to socialise and to talk with anyone. Although this may be true it has also made us more detached from reality therefore it’s legitimate to ask ourselves if social media are genuinely connecting people or if they are the root of loneliness. Social media are making us more disconnected for plenty of reasons. For instance, with the advent of social media relationships are more superficial since our prolonged screen time interferes with our ability to socialise. These new behaviours are dictated by how shallow social media are structured: the number of followers that teenagers have determine if they are “cool” or “losers”. These “rules” alter the ability to be comfortable in a space that should be free of judgement. To put it differently, most teenagers give more importance to the quantity of relationships and not to the quality. As a result teenagers often have no one to trust and no one to confide in. One of the major problems caused by social media is cyberbullying. According to a study of the University of Georgia, too much time spent on social media increases every teenager's risk of being bullied online or becoming a cyberbully. Teenagers feel more free to become bullies due to the fact that they remain anonymous thus they can also avoid the consequences. As has been noted, in most cases social media makes us more disconnected from reality and consequently more lonely. As a matter of fact this phenomenon is a marketing strategy: social media causes loneliness and then proposes a solution to put a stop to said solitude. Given these points, we can affirm that social media are a paradox since they should help us connect but they end up making us feel more lonely.