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How To Fight Loneliness: Facebook?

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein has an essay about Facebook's impact on today's youth. Orenstein worries about two different, separate things: first, that college-age kids will find it difficult to forge new identities because of their social networking pasts, and second, that Facebook provides such a comforting connection that these members of Gen Y will lose out on "an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness."

As an older member of Generation Y, I think Peggy misses the mark a bit. While I'm certain college kids do spend a lot of their time networking socially, there's not a one-to-one correlation between their Facebook selves and their personas in real life (or IRL, as the kids say). Part of the reason Facebook is so popular is that it allows the user to control his or her experience. It truly is possible for an 18-year-old to delete their profiles or to have the wherewithal to defriend the people who made them miserable in high school. Even though they spend a lot of time on their MacBooks, I find it difficult to believe that they're not also disengaging from the computer, having late-night real-person chats with their floor mates, and experimenting with Sartre and sex, just like many college kids before them.

Which brings me to Orenstein's other point: that Facebook somehow alleviates or prevents the loneliness that many young people feel when first leaving the nest. Nothing sounds more alienating than being miserable at college and seeing Sarah's status message pop up about how she's "On her way to the Bon Iver concert with Dave." Being constantly confronted with your friends' social triumphs when you're flailing seems like it would be incredibly lonely-making. Even if your buddies are all similarly depressed or floundering in college, there's still something sterile about the clean lines and ice blue color scheme of Facebook. I find it hard to believe that it's a satisfying replacement for actual human contact, even for those born after 1990.