Is Facebook Making Us Lonely Summary

The article I wrote my essay on, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely” argues the effects of social media sites and how it has caused people to separate farther apart instead of coming together. The author believes “We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society.” (pg.3). I think that the article gives several statistical analysis to show the reader that the current society is slowly becoming less and less real. Marche argues that since we spend so much time texting, Facebook messaging and sending tweets to communicate with one another that we have lost the touch of actually socializing in real life. As a teenager in college, I see several …show more content…
The author starts off with an emotional appeal to attract the reader. He talks about how Vickers’ death was discovered by a neighbor almost two years after she had actually died. In our society, movie stars are considered to be the most popular and least likely to be considered lonely. When in reality, that has been the case since the arrival of social media such as Facebook. Another point that Marche tries to get across is by using this story is to show how her popularity drastically increased socially after her death. “…Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets…Certainly she received much more attention in death then she did in the final years of her life. “ (pg.2). This causes the reader to realize that being lonely is an actual issue that we need to focus on instead of something that we can push away as a mere …show more content…
According to a study in 2010, a survey found that there was an increase by 10% of the adults, above the age of 45, who were chronically lonely in just one decade. This shows the reader that this problem is continuously increasing overtime. In the article he shows the increase in issues pertaining to things that might be the reason people are lonely, such as marriage, belief in God, or even drug usage. This is because due to social media, we tend to go out less which in turn causes us to meet less people. Social media is often only used to keep up and reconnect with old friends and family, but it doesn’t give us the opportunity to make new friend.
After writing mostly about the bad aspects of Facebook, Marche tells us that it is not just the fault of the people who invented social media sites, it is also mostly our fault as well. Moira Burke, a recent graduate student “…concluded that the effect of Facebook depends on what we bring to it.” (pg.10). Social media sites were intended to bring people together, but it has caused us to grow farther apart. On several social media sites people set up event to do things with their friends. That is not the problem, it is when we use those same social media sites as a substitute to going to the events