Connected or Just Contactable? Technology and Human Relationships

It is perhaps the essential contradiction of modern life: We live in the most "connected" era in human history, but a huge number of us feel a profound sense of loneliness and social isolation. Pocket-sized devices can instantly connect us with anyone on the planet, but can these millions of digital linkages ever replace our core relationships? The truth is complicated. Technological change has impacted both the cohesion of our communities and the nature of friendship, creating uncomfortable paradoxes in modern social life.

Let’s start with the positive. The internet and social media are unprecedented tools for maintaining relationships across huge distances. If you move across the country, you can video chat with your parents whenever you like. If you move to the other side of the world, you can see pictures of your best friend's new baby a few hours after he is born. These tools help to keep alive relationships that, in a pre-internet world, might have faded away to just an annual holiday card. Technology is great at maintaining our less critical ties and making it easier to sustain a personal social network.

Social media and online communities can also be a lifeline for marginalized groups. Individuals who feel isolated in their immediate physical community can find vibrant and supportive communities online. For instance, studies have shown that LGBTQ+ youth often have a higher number of close online friends than their non-LGBTQ+ peers, suggesting that the internet fills a crucial gap for connection and support. The ability to find your "people" without any geographical constraints is a win for social well-being. Beyond personal identity, this potential for connection is also true of niche interests, such as playing a specific board game or a doing a particular type of crafting. If you feel out of place in your daily life, you may be able to connect with likeminded people online.

But the easy access to millions of people has also changed our expectations for friendship. We've mostly replaced our small, high-effort gardens of close friendships with an enormous, low-effort fields of acquaintances. The work of anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests there is a cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships a person can maintain. The number he gives is 150, which is often referred to as “Dunbar’s Number”. There are different social layers inside this group of 150 people, with the innermost circle of true, intimate friends maxing out at about five people. Dunbar argues that while social media can help us manage a larger overall network, it doesn't magically expand our capacity for those deep friendships that require significant time and emotional investment.

Relationships are not just about quantity, but also about quality. Real friendships—the kind that foster deep trust and mutual understanding—require time spent in meaningful interaction and reciprocal exchanges. One study found that it takes approximately 200 hours of shared time to transition from a casual acquaintance to an intimate friend. Scrolling through updates and pressing the like button don't have the same value as a face-to-face coffee.

Despite its original intent, social media made users less social with their real-life friends, with fewer than half of American users reporting they connect with close friends often on these platforms. And even when we are talking to friends, the worldwide spread of social media is reconfiguring social bonds and creating new ways of interacting. "Phubbing" (ignoring the person next to you to be on your phone) and other new behaviors need to be understood in how they are interpreted by people of different generations and cultures. As human communication becomes asynchronous and mediated, we need to recognize the changes and learn ways to live with them.

So with all of these challenges, should we ditch technology completely? That would be highly impractical and for most of us completely unfeasible. Finding ourselves living here in this new reality, it has become important to balance digital interactions with real life interactions and use new technologies in a mindful way. A good way to do this is to focus on intentionality. This means making a conscious effort to schedule uninterrupted face-to-face time with our core friends, leaving our phones on silent or out of sight. Instead of just broadcasting into the void, we can prioritize direct messaging and reminiscing with our close friends.

The digital age has brought us a huge number of advantages, but some new challenges as well. Technology provides the incredible capacity to be connected to the whole world, but our most vital task is to ensure we are truly present for the small, important world right in front of us. A thousand likes can never replace a genuine smile from a close friend.