This time, I'd like to talk about social networking and loneliness.
What does social networking mean to you?
Is it a tool to communicate with friends, to do business, to make new connections with strangers, or to deceive people?
Although there are many problems, it is becoming indispensable, and before we know it, it will become a tool to gather people's voices, so much so that the government will no longer be able to ignore its movement.
In the early days of LINE, Facebook and Twitter, there was so much talk about them.
In psychology, there are many studies that investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using social networking sites, and the study I'm going to introduce here is about loneliness.
The Study
This cross-sectional survey-based study was conducted between January and December 2018 and involved 456 residents of a randomly selected community from Lebanon.Findings indicated that 107 (23.7%) participants had a social media use disorder.
The results of the stepwise linear regression with loneliness score as the dependent variable showed higher social media use disorder among females compared to males and among those with secondary education level compared to illiterate.
There was also a high rate of insomnia and a tendency toward dysphoria, which was found to be associated with a high level of loneliness.
Discussion
The results of the study suggest that people who use social networking sites excessively are more likely to feel lonely, have insomnia, and may have emotional problems.Although these results are worded this way, there is room to consider the causality of whether or not social networking use is leading to these results.
According to the researchers, insomnia may be more of a problem, affecting emotions. The researchers believe that insomnia may be more of a problem, affecting emotions.
The survey items also showed that in terms of feeling lonely, some people felt less social loneliness and more emotional loneliness.
Less social loneliness may mean that fewer people see social networking as unnecessary, so if used appropriately, social networking may not be a bad thing.
However, those who use them excessively may be using them to drown their loneliness, but since it is emotionally difficult to relieve their loneliness, the deterioration of their usage may become inescapable.
In such a situation, even if the situation is socially difficult to feel lonely, the inconvenience in real life will only increase, such as cutting off relations with people because of feeling too much loneliness emotionally.
The study also suggests that feeling lonely emotionally may lead to emotional disturbances and a decrease in trust in others. This is what the study said.
Youssef L, Hallit R, Kheir N, Obeid S, Hallit S. Social media use disorder and loneliness: any association between the two? Results of a cross-sectional Results of a cross-sectional study among Lebanese adults [published correction appears in BMC Psychiatry. 2020 Jun 23;20(1):327] [published correction appears in BMC Psychol. 2020 Jul 8;8(1):72]. BMC Psychol. 2020;8(1):56. published 2020 Jun 1. doi:10.1186/s40359-020-00421-5
Conclusion
Even though we use social networking sites to eliminate loneliness, more and more people are using them to amplify their feelings of loneliness emotionally, which can lead to problems in connecting with others in real life.
The results of the study suggest that this is the case.
It is not uncommon for people to be on social networking sites at all hours of the day, or to monitor the activities of others, and those who have no choice but to use social networking sites for work should also be aware of this.
