Is social media making us grow further apart?

You may have hundreds of Facebook friends, or thousands of Instagram followers. You religiously send out Snapchat pictures and tell everyone about your day on Twitter. But how many of those people would you say you have a genuine human connection to?

You may have countless Facebook friends and social media followers, but in the end what does that really mean? Source

You may have countless Facebook friends and social media followers, but in the end what does that really mean? Source

In The Fourth Revolution, Floridi argues that technology has shifted our social interactions as there has been an erosion of the “right to ignore”, and what is deemed “common knowledge” is much greater than before due to the widespread availability of information online.

With this shift, there is also an increased amount of responsibility that comes if you want to maintain a relationship. It is no longer acceptable to simply catch up in person when meeting an old friend again by making the excuse that you had no way of knowing what was going on in their life, and this increased burden caused by the erosion of the "right to ignore" means that it may be easier to let certain relationships fall to the wayside in order to avoid the pressure of engaging with other people's lives on a surface level.

When friendships become data on a timeline that you can view Source

Imagine someone you haven’t talked to in a while sending you a “happy birthday” message. In the past, there might have been some sense newfound appreciation for that person (“wow, this person remembered my birthday!”). But now, with all that personal information readily accessible online constituting part of what Floridi deems to be "common knowledge", such gestures become far less personal.

Further explanations for this more superficial feeling are brought up by Vallor in Social Media Virtues. For one, people on social networking sites are unlikely to put their authentic selves forward, since the construction of a profile “encourages members to construct carefully edited version of themselves”. Secondly, having the physical presence of someone offering their condolences or wishing you happy birthday “communicates a degree of empathy” beyond what can be offered by social media, since we can actually feel the presence of another.

With social media interactions becoming increasingly dominant, it has become more important than ever before to savor the genuine human connections that we have. After all, our friends list and followers list do not accurately represent the connections that we have in reality.