In-Person Socialization Down, but Social Media Isn't to Blame
hubie writes:
In-Person Socialization Down, but Social Media Isn't to Blame:
Jeffrey Hall is passionate about two things in particular - friendship and social media - and he thinks the latter is too often mistaken as the enemy of the former.
[...] "The social displacement hypothesis is probably the most well-known, long-lasting explanation for where time spent using new technologies - from the internet to texting, and now social media - comes from," Hall said. "The social displacement argument says that new media cuts into our face-to-face time. The best available evidence suggests it's just not so."
Hall took data on FtF time from the U.S. Department of Labor's annual American Time Use Survey and from similar governmental studies in Australia and Great Britain between 1995 and 2021 and plotted them on a single chart. All three lines decline over time at a similar rate.
[...] "The fact that the U.K. data track U.S. data so tightly despite using slightly different methods in different years is surprising," Hall said.
This international trend of reduced time in face-to-face communication may reflect growing rates of loneliness, according to the authors.
[...] "The best available evidence suggests face-to-face is in competition with hours spent at work and commuting," Hall said. In other words, people who work longer spend more of their leisure time alone. During the pandemic, when people got that time back from commuting, "They still spent it working virtually," Hall said. "They didn't spend it socializing with each other.
"It seems we live in a society that privileges working and media consumption over everything else," Hall said. "The decline in face-to-face time is a matter of priority and a matter of availability. And we are neither prioritizing face-to-face time, nor are we available to do so."
Journal Reference:
Jeffrey Hall and Dong Liu, Social media use, social displacement, and well-being, Cur. Op. in Psych., 46, 2022
DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101339"
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