provided us with advances too numerous to list here. You can probably think of a dozen ways your phone and the internet have made your life better. But I propose that personal technology has also built obstacles into our social lives that prevent the natural generation of closeness between people. The bad news is that this means you will need to make a conscious effort to overcome these obstacles. The good news is that your loneliness is really, truly not your fault.
You are not lonely because you are less likable than your grandparents were. You are not lonely because you are flawed. You are lonely primarily because your environment is working against you.
There are three specific ways in which technology is making it harder for us to get — and stay — close:
1. Mediated interaction (interaction through a device) is becoming the norm.
2. Technology is teaching us certain lessons that are not helpful for creating closeness.
3. Technology is reducing our natural opportunities to get close.
Let’s talk a little about each one.
Obstacle 1: Mediated Interaction
More and more, our default mode of interacting with one another is through a mediator — a device. This is the first way in which personal technology is putting up roadblocks to closeness: it is making mediated interaction the norm. Mediated interaction, by definition, is not direct access to one another. Remember, closeness is defined as direct access to another person’s inner world. The more we replace in-person closeness with mediated interaction, the harder it is to understand anyone else’s inner world — or for them to understand yours.
If mediated interaction were simply making a phone call or video chatting while saving up for a plane ticket to visit friends and family, I wouldn’t see it as exacerbating loneliness. Technology is extremely useful for keeping relationships going in between periods of in-person togetherness. The issue is that mediated interaction is replacing in-person togetherness. Phone calls and video chats become a problem when they start replacing plane tickets all together.
One type of mediated interaction that deserves special attention here is social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, to name just a few. In some ways the combination of mobile phones and social networks is the perfect storm of mediated interaction. It feels so much like you have people around. You can feel as if you are carrying people around in your pocket at all times. But is this ability really making you happy? Is it really making you feel less alone?
Tell me you haven’t felt disappointed when someone close to you posts on your Facebook wall instead of calling to wish you a happy birthday. Tell me you haven’t found it annoying when someone repeatedly “likes” your Instagram posts while simultaneously ignoring your attempts to hang out. Maybe you’ve gotten excited about someone you met on a social network, only to find out it was all smoke and mirrors. We’ve all received an email or text from a friend with an odd tension to it. It’s too short or too brusque, or just . . . off. A slightly accusatory tone? Maybe she’s mad at me. She’s mad. I’m pretty sure she is.
These are the barriers — the mental and emotional ones — we sense even after all practical barriers have been removed. It feels as if there are barriers because of our core point here: we do not really have direct access to one another.
We cannot feel what another person is feeling over Instagram. We cannot understand what our friend is thinking over Pinterest. We cannot embrace each other over Skype. You cannot really know and care through a screen.
Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are a more innocent result of technology’s lack of direct access. A more nefarious result is intentional secrecy. It’s been proven that everyone lies on online dating profiles, but generally just a little bit — an inch of height here and a few pounds there — nothing important. And it’s not as if people can’t lie in person; they certainly can. But they can’t lie nearly as much in person as they can online.
The secrecy afforded by technology has become something of a novelty. We’ve never been allowed to be this anonymous with one another before, and we’re starting to see anonymity as a fun pastime.
Just nine months after its launch, a mobile app called Secret raised $35 million in funding. Secret is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to tell your friends (and friends-of-friends and neighbors) your secrets, while remaining anonymous. The company that created a similar app — Whisper — was named one of “the World’s Most Innovative Companies in Social Media” by Fast Company in 2014. Secret’s tagline says it all: “Share anonymously with friends, co-workers and people nearby. Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling.”
Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling. It’s a mind-boggling statement, when you think about it. It implies that somehow, despite our unprecedented levels of access to one another, we actually know less about what we are all really thinking and feeling.
These anonymous apps are not the only social media that make our interactions flimsier. The king of the fleeting interaction and fastest-growing app of 2014 — Snapchat — allows messages to be viewed for only ten seconds or less. Sobrr, one of the fastest-growing seed companies of 2014, enables “users to create ephemeral online friendships through messaging and photo sharing. These 24-hour friendships expire unless both parties agree to continue.”
Are these apps fun and entertaining? Yes. Are they popular? Definitely. Do they function in a way that’s inherently dysfunctional for communicating about anything that matters? I’d say so. Are they helping us build satisfying relationships? Not really.
Mediated interaction can be treacherous. In essence, it gives you the sensation of having more people around you than are physically present. Social networks can convince you that you have people in your life. This makes it all the more disturbing if you then wake up one day and find yourself profoundly lonely.
Luckily, the way to overcome the obstacle of mediated interaction is relatively simple: we need to view mediated interaction as something we use in service of in-person interaction. Technology should not be shunned — quite the opposite! Used in the right way, connecting via technology can help you have more closeness in your life. It just depends on how you use it.
The first step in using technological connectedness in service of closeness is adding layers of communication back in. Even when we’re doing our best to be honest and straightforward, connecting through an intermediary — a chat client, for example — removes layers of communication that people need in order to get to know one another well.
The value of voice tone, body language, facial expression, and emotional signals should not be underestimated. By some accounts, nonexplicit communication makes up 93 percent of the messages we receive. If you have a choice between simple words and words plus voice tone, go with the more layered choice. If you can add facial expression in, go for it. The more layers the better.
I also recommend reserving technological connectedness for maintaining an already close relationship, as opposed to using technology to create one. It’s extremely difficult to do the work of knowing and caring if you and the other person are not in the same physical space. But devices do remove many of the limitations of distance, travel, time zones, and overall busy lives. If used in the right way, they can help keep your hearts and minds close while your physical selves are distant.
Obstacle 2: The Lessons Technology Is Teaching Us
The second way in which technology is getting in the way of closeness is that it’s changing the way we think. Many of us — particularly those of us
