#chroniquefd: Alone Together

The cliché made by the young New York photographer Dina Litovsky, who likes to document the present moment with her camera, is simple, but says a lot: On the screen, the pixels are arranged to show a boy surrounded by two girls — a dinner party. The trio smiles, eyes glued to the screen of a digital communication machine. On the sidelines, although close, a blond woman stares into space with a white bag on her thighs. She is not trendy. She is alone. And above all, she seems profoundly bored.

Exhibited in Boston last fall and on the web since then, the image has cried out for attention. How? By successfully capturing, with a click of the shutter button, the spirit of a present where ultra-connectivity and the digitalization of social networks — at home, as in the trendy clubs of urban America — must be combined, paradoxically, with times of solitude. It appears that way, at least.

The latest issue of the very nourishing American magazine The Atlantic, moreover, poses the question: Does Facebook make us more solitary? The paper takes account of the digital socialization in its entirety, by means of Facebook, Twitter and others. It brings out its scientific studies and underlines, in passing, the density of our modern networks that – strangely enough today – while claiming the opposite, nonetheless seem to separate humans, not bring them together. And for what, as some would say.

Recurring Theme

The theme of solitude in a time of digital over-socialization re-occurs through the times in which we live, stimulated by the appearance of data on our behavior that is sometimes troubling, and their consequence in worlds that are not.

In the Facebook network, the nearly billion users today boast of having at least 190 virtual friends per user: that is, enough to fill more than three school buses.

That is a lot. It is also far from the social reality carried out by a series of recent studies. In bulk: Here, one teaches us that the number of close friends — those who you can tell anything — for the average American went from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.04 in 2004. There, a quarter of the population claim to not have anyone to talk to, and a third of people say they feel alone, even if they are surrounded.

Those who place the increasing loneliness of the 2.0 times on the back of digitalization and of our relationship to the other that, more and more, makes us ignore space and time, borrow on an easy path. It is a shortcut that tends to make us mention, in passing, that urbanization, urban sprawl, aging and individualism also contributed.

Too bad a number of other studies tended to demonstrate the inverse. They underlined, for example, that solitude is more easily broken among those adept at social networks, who are entered in groups in an era where communication between humans has developed in an exponential manner in the last five years. Especially among young people, but also among old people.

The numbers speak: Every 60 seconds, 700,000 messages are sent by Facebook, and 175,000 pass through Twitter. On average, an American adolescent is able to produce close to 100 text messages a day. And a sizeable portion of this youth admit to doing this just to combat boredom.

The urgency of communicating, socializing and, as a result, existing in digital universes is frenetic. It has also found its quantification in the last days. Twenty-seven: that is the number of times in an hour of entertainment that an Internet user in her 20s can go from one screen to another. IPhone, laptop, TV, return to iPhone, tablet, return to the TV, alouette….

It is also for this that, 2,000 times each minute, someone on the global mobility registers her geographic position and transmits it to her friends through Foursquare. Elsewhere on the web, others go through Klout to be assured, by the magic of this algorithm that claims — by blustering a little — to quantify their online popularity, that they exist good and well.

This need of thousands of Internet users to appear in order to be is the supply choir: by sharing a word on the Twitter network to comment in real time on a TV program to keep up to date on the latest Justin Bieber gossip, without knowing him, or again to organize the movement of crowds in a city during a strike. All united, a big blow to binary code…

The era is of connections, fake or real, that live as a way to stem solitude for some or still as a source of anxiety for others that this frenzy of ego is may be, a little, starting to make us sick.

A few weeks ago, Pew Research Center shed light on a study underlining that the digitalization of social relationships among young people was beginning, among some, to give birth to an ineptness with physical socialization outside of new electronic means of living together.

Elsewhere, the trouble is known in Japan, the funny digital world before the rest of the planet, under the name of Taijin kyofusho, the fear of personal relationships. And, beginning to be installed in the West, it is confirmed that in the digital worlds, the human is without a doubt not in the process of becoming alone. Maybe he is just a little lost and finds himself again in a group.