Opinion | The Blindness of Social Wealth - The New York Times - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...facebook-social-wealth.html
wealth social media social facebook depression loneliness relations psychology
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“The truth is, relationships are the most valuable and value-creating resource of any society. They are our lifelines to survive, grow and thrive.”
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There’s a mountain of evidence suggesting that the quality of our relationships has been in steady decline for decades.
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Suicide rates are now at a 30-year high. Depression rates have increased tenfold since 1960, which is not only a result of greater reporting.
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There’s been a steady 30-year decline in Americans’ satisfaction with the peer-to-peer relationships at work.
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“During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.”
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Weak social connections have health effects similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and a greater negative effect than obesity, he said.
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In 2012, 5.9 percent of young people suffered from severe mental health issues. By 2015 it was 8.2 percent.
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More and more Americans are socially poor. And yet it is very hard for the socially wealthy to even see this fact.
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Most of the questions he faced at the congressional hearings and most of the analysis in the press were about Facebook’s failure to protect privacy. That’s the sort of thing that may be uppermost on your mind if you are socially wealthy
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But the big issue surrounding Facebook is not privacy. It’s that Facebook and other social media companies are feeding this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.
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heavy internet users are much less likely to have contact with their proximate neighbors to exchange favors and extend care. There’s something big happening to the social structure of neighborhoods.
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The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar observes that human societies exist on three levels: the clan (your family and close friends), the village (your local community) and the tribe (your larger group)
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In America today you would say that the clans have polarized, the villages have been decimated and the tribes have become weaponized.
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That is, some highly educated families have helicopter parents while less fortunate families have absent parents. The middle ring cross-class associations of town and neighborhood have fallen apart. People try to compensate for the lack of intimate connection by placing their moral and emotional longings on their political, ethnic and other tribes, turning them viciously on each other.