The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Facebooker

Jess, I was struck by the story of Demi Moore and the allegedly suicidal tweeter, too. As you so rightly point out, tweeting to a near stranger about your plans to kill yourself shows signs of disconnect, rather than connection. In this sense, I think Peggy Orenstein was onto something—even if she didn't spell it out—when she talked about a "growth through loneliness" she got to enjoy as a teenager in a pre-connected era who could discard old selves (and friends) with each new step. The irony she starts to unpack is that—according to psychologists in her piece, at least—many kids seem to find connectivity more lonely than being alone. All those "friends" reporting on their activity can make you feel even more like an isolated weirdo when you're down. 

I'm sure tons of psychologists are studying Facebook as social phenomenon. One question I have is about how Facebook plays with your sense of time. I suspect it messes with eveyone's sense of time, but perhaps it has been especially odd for those of us in our 30s and 40s who had already gone through the process of letting go of old friends when ... voilà! There they were, friending us again, flooding our news feed with their status updates about kids, husbands, wives, work, American Idol. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. I may have had a higher-than-usual dose of this of late because my mother died at Christmas, and she was the head of my middle school. So I was flooded with messages from old friends (now new "friends") about her. It was extremely reassuring at the time, I have to say: It made me feel that life has some continuity and, well, enduring connection, especially since many of these notes were about my mother's influence on their lives. But at less stressful moments, I'm sometimes shaken to glimpse a photo of an old lost kindred spirit on my feed. ... What would Anne of Green Gables have thought? The other day at brunch, a slightly older friend talked about being pulled into this same vortex, becoming almost depressed by this reminder of times past, selves left behind, there on his screen, updating away, hour after hour. It's a strange kind of connection, that's so far. Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels.