Image recognition helps find your keys / wallet BBC

Kinsight uses Kinect sensor to find lost keys and wallets Objects tracked by the Kinsight system The team used their system to track a range of objects around a home Continue reading the main story Related Stories Microsoft launches Kinect for PCs Interface controls compete at CES Earthquake rescue with Kinect bot Forgetful geeks need never lose keys, phones or even cutlery at home again. Two computer science researchers have developed a depth-camera based system that keeps track of household objects as they are moved around a building. The project - dubbed Kinsight - relies on several of Microsoft's Kinect sensors attached to a computer running the team's software. Although the project is still at an experimental stage, it has been shown to work in a "real-world scenario". Details of the system were recently outlined at a conference in China and were subsequently reported by New Scientist. "Imagine if we had a system that could keep account of all the objects that we interact with in our daily lives," the researchers said. "By keeping track of the locations of the objects, we could build a smart search engine for our home that could answer queries like - where are my eye glasses, or my TV-remote, or my wallet?" Although alternative solutions, such as the use of radio-frequency identification chips already exists, the men said their system was many times cheaper due to the high cost of RFID readers. What goes where The researchers noted that running a computer program that simultaneously tracked all the owner's objects in real-time would be too processor-intensive. So they based their design around the principle that objects only change locations when humans move them. As a result the system focuses on tracking human figures and then looking for objects that have changed position in their vicinity. Although the Kinect sensor's capabilities are limited - it only sees objects up to 11 feet (3.4m) away and only provides "skeleton data" at 15 frames/second - the Kinsight program has commonsense notions built into it to improve accuracy: so it knows that a coffee cup is most likely to be found at a study desk, or kitchen sink, but not inside a bath. Kinect sensor The researchers say accuracy could be improved if Microsoft releases a more powerful Kinect "This means that, when in doubt, an object recognition algorithm can use this knowledge to identify an object by analysing the likelihood of it being at some location, or looking for the candidate objects in their other locations," the researchers said. On the move Algorithms were also created to help the computer learn the appearance of objects and the context they were likely to be used in by analysing the data gathered. To prove the system worked the two scientists labelled 48 objects - including knives, forks, keys and a Rubik's cube - and identified 80 possible locations around a house. They then asked volunteers to move the items around according to randomly generated patterns. The results suggested room for improvement - errors were more likely if the objects were very small, far away, transparent or placed too closely together - but the team said these problems should be addressed by using more sensors per room and adopting more sensitive depth-cameras. In the meantime, they say that even when the program does lose track of possessions, it can still say were they were last seen which may still prove helpful.

L'offensive secrète d'Obama contre l'Iran

Révélations sur l'extrême implication du président dans les cyberattaques contre le programme nucléaire deTéhéran. Le virus Stuxnet, développé conjointement par les États-Unis et Israël sous le nom de «Jeux olympiques», visait à détraquer le programme nucléaire iranien. Il a réussi au-delà de toute espérance. Dans un livre qui vient de paraître aux États-Unis, la Maison-Blanche reconnaît à mots couverts l'implication extrême du président Barack Obama. À quelques jours de son intronisation, en janvier 2009, Barack Obama est convoqué à la Maison-Blanche pour un aparté très discret avec son prédécesseur, George W. Bush. Ce que dit le quarante-troisième président des États-Unis est sans détour. Il est vital, martèle Bush, de préserver deux actions en cours: l'utilisation de drones au Pakistan dans la lutte contre al-Qaida et la cyberguerre contre l'Iran. Ce qui suit est relaté dans un livre publié mardi aux États-Unis, signé par David Sanger*, rédacteur au New York Times, qui livre des témoignages inédits. Barack Obama découvre qu'une «sale guerre» très secrète se joue depuis 2006 contre le régime chiite de Téhéran. Non pas avec des troupes au sol, mais avec des ordinateurs, des virus et des codes malveillants. Une guerre moins sanglante en apparence, mais tout aussi âpre, et dont l'issue pourrait également «décider de la guerre ou de la paix», comme n'hésite pas à lui confier le président sortant. L'arme fatale, en l'occurrence, est un virus informatique d'une puissance inégalée, nom de code «Olympic Games » («Jeux olympiques»), qui, depuis deux ans, sème le chaos au sein du programme nucléaire iranien. Programme nucléaire souterrain À la surprise générale, Obama va se muer en chef de guerre déterminé, à mille lieues de sa pusillanimité supposée en matière de politique étrangère. Omniprésent dans la conduite des opérations, le président démocrate exige un briefing hebdomadaire sur l'état de l'offensive en cours, donnant son aval à chaque nouvelle cyberattaque contre l'Iran. «Jamais, écrit Sanger, depuis Lyndon Johnson et le choix des cibles à bombarder au Nord-Vietnam, un président n'avait été impliqué d'aussi près dans l'escalade pas à pas d'une attaque contre les infrastructures d'une nation étrangère.» L'origine du programme remonte à 2006, lorsque l'Administration Bush constate l'épuisement des stratégies traditionnelles face à des dirigeants iraniens de plus en plus arrogants. Convenant que des frappes conventionnelles auraient peu d'effets sur un programme nucléaire souterrain et disséminé aux quatre coins du vaste désert iranien, la Maison-Blanche décide de lancer des «cyberattaques» contre le cœur de ce programme, les souterrains de Natanz, à 250 km au sud de Téhéran. «Jeux olympiques» doit pouvoir détruire les très sensibles centrifugeuses de Natanz, en modifiant la vitesse de rotation de leurs moteurs. Dans cette opération américano-israélienne, les programmateurs de la National Security Agency (NSA), à Fort Meade (Maryland), près de Washington, collaborent avec une unité spéciale de guerre électronique de Tsahal, connue sous le nom d'Unité 8200. Initialement baptisé «The Bug» par ses créateurs, le virus va être testé avec succès sur des centrifugeuses libyennes d'un modèle semblable, saisies en 2003. Reste à l'inséminer dans le très secret système informatique du programme nucléaire iranien. Il fallait trouver un ingénieur ou un technicien physiquement rattaché aux installations de Natanz pour y introduire involontairement le virus. «C'était notre Saint-Graal, commente laconiquement l'un des auteurs du projet. Et il s'avère qu'il y a toujours un idiot pour ne pas trop réfléchir à ce que contient la clé USB entre ses mains.» Les résultats vont au-delà des espérances. «Olympic Games» s'infiltre dans les arcanes de Natanz, déclenchant des pannes de centrifugeuses, en apparence bénignes et localisées. Jusqu'à ce que survienne un couac majeur en 2010. Le virus échappe à ses créateurs lorsqu'un ingénieur iranien le libère tout à fait involontairement sur Internet. La menace, détectée durant l'été aux quatre coins du globe, est rebaptisée Stuxnet par les experts en sécurité informatique. Mille centrifugeuses détruites Barack Obama se trouve à la croisée des chemins. Il doit décider de tout arrêter avant qu'il ne soit trop tard, que cette arme d'un genre nouveau désormais révélée au grand jour ne soit décortiquée par les ennemis des États-Unis et ne revienne comme un boomerang sur les infrastructures vitales américaines. Convaincu des dégâts «prometteurs» causés à Natanz, Obama autorise deux nouvelles cyberattaques, à l'aide d'une version perfectionnée de «Jeux olympiques», rebaptisé «Flame» (flamme). Il ne le regrettera pas. «Flame» réussit l'exploit de détruire mille exemplaires de centrifugeuses iraniennes ultramodernes de type Ir-2. Mieux, les interceptions révèlent que l'Iran est en train de perdre confiance en son savoir-faire et ses ingénieurs. Certains d'entre eux sont même limogés sans autre forme de procès. Le chaos est complet dans les souterrains de Natanz et les laboratoires de la capitale iranienne. Les sources consultées par Sanger sont formelles: malgré le fiasco de Stuxnet, «Flame» a sans doute retardé d'un an et demi à deux ans le programme nucléaire iranien dans sa quête de la bombe. Un délai précieux, censé permettre aux sanctions internationales de faire enfin entendre raison au régime iranien. Cet objectif-là n'est pas encore atteint. * David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, Crown publishers, juin 2012.

Big data from social networks take trendwatching to new level WASHpost

‘Big data’ from social media, elsewhere online redefines trend-watching By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Published: June 6 From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace. The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short. Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals, companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news faster than traditional investment approaches. The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM. “Big data,” as it has been dubbed by researchers, has become so valuable that the World Economic Forum, in a report published last year, deemed it a new class of economic asset, like oil. “Business boundaries are being redrawn,” the report said. Companies with the ability to mine the data are becoming the most powerful, it added. While the human brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and other expressions of daily life. “This is changing the world in a big way. It enables us to watch changes in society in real time and make decisions in a way we haven’t been able to ever before,” said Gary King, a social science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of Crimson Hexagon, a data analysis firm based in Boston. The Obama campaign employs rows of people manning computers that monitor Twitter sentiment about the candidates in key states. Google scientists are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of flu around the world by analyzing what people are typing in to search. And the United Nations is measuring inflation through computers that analyze the price of bread advertised in online supermarkets across Latin America. Many questions about big data remain unanswered. Concerns are being raised about personal privacy and how consumers can ensure that their information is being used fairly. Some worry that savvy technologists could use Twitter or Google to create false trends and manipulate markets. Even so, sociologists, software engineers, economists, policy analysts and others in nearly every field are jumping into the fray. And nowhere has big data been as transformative as it has been in finance. Wall Street is all about information advantage. Every little bit could mean the difference between a bonanza or a devastating loss, and so big data is being fed into computers to power high-frequency trading algorithms — and directly to traders in every way imaginable. Hedge funds are experimenting with scanning comments on Amazon product pages to try to predict sales. Banks are tallying job listings on Monster as an indicator of hiring. Investment firms are conducting computer analyses of the financial statements of public companies to search for signs of a bankruptcy. Why wait for the government to release official numbers on auto sales, home sales and retail sales when the trends could be gleaned weeks or even months earlier by analyzing publicly available data online? Five years ago, only 2 percent of investment firms were incorporating Twitter analysis and other forms of “unstructured” data into their trading decisions, according to a report by Adam Honore, a research director at Aite, a financial services consulting group based in Boston. By 2010, the share of companies experimenting with this technology jumped to 35 percent. Today, Honore said, that number is closer to 50 percent. “Big data is fundamentally changing how we trade,” Honore said. ‘Data in motion’ Richard Tibbetts, chief technology officer at StreamBase, a Lexington, Mass., company that provides tools for analyzing large amounts of data, calls it “examining data in motion.” The trick is to be able to find the digital smoke signals amid all the other stuff. Traders who were analyzing Twitter for unusual activity, for instance, were able to get the news of Osama bin Laden’s death and a massacre in Norway hours before the information was officially confirmed, giving them a significant jump on their colleagues who learned of the events through traditional news sources. “The new generation of trader expects to have dozens of tools at their fingertips instead of just a Bloomberg terminal,” Tibbetts said. Hawtin began experimenting with trading on a social-media sentiment algorithm in the spring of 2011, tapping $40 million from his now-closed hedge fund. He has repeatedly warned potential investors that there is a high level of risk. “It’s a very new area we don’t fully understand yet,” he said. But the interest in his project was so great that in April he began offering his technology to retail investors. In addition to its efforts to gauge the collective mood of the world, the company now examines messages on Twitter, Facebook and other social-media outlets to create measures for individual stocks and commodities. On a recent weekday, Hawtin was studying his global sentiment monitor when he noticed something troubling, a surge in anxiety after two days of relative calm. After deliberating for a few minutes, he decided it was too early to take any action. If the anxiety continued to trend up the following day, he said, he would probably start selling. “There’s a delay between how you’re feeling about your economic situation and having that sentiment turned into a decision like buying or selling a stock or adjusting your portfolio,” he said. The numbers support Hawtin’s strategy — at least so far. His investors beat the main London stock index by seven-fold in the first quarter of this year. But programs such as Hawtin’s are only as good as the data being entered, and a growing backlash against big data may threaten the flow of that information. Privacy concerns Companies and governments are pushing the envelope in the use and reuse of data in ways not originally intended, and privacy groups are pushing back. Even the basic definition of personal data varies widely from one country to another, making it unclear how it can be used. The regulatory framework has not caught up with the technology. Tim Berners-Lee, a founder of the World Wide Web, has become so concerned about the misuse of personal information by companies and governments that he has warned people to be cautious about what they put online. The data sets are so large that they are normally analyzed in aggregate, but privacy advocates worry that information can still be tied to individuals. Civil liberties groups have sued to stop a U.S. government program that monitors social media data for national security threats, arguing that it could be used to unjustly label people as bad credit risks — or even terrorists — and chill free speech. There is also the danger of what scholars call information asymmetry, where certain parties have an unfair advantage because they have better information than others — a phenomenon that some have argued shakes the foundation of a market economy. “It increases opportunities for those who are already richer and disadvantages those that are poor,” said Jay Stanley, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Beyond the civil liberties issue, data streams can be manipulated. You can spam Twitter streams with positive words about a stock to make it look as if there is a groundswell of optimism about the company. Or you can use the same techniques to try to sink a stock. Vagelis Hristidis, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Riverside, is the lead author of a paper detailing another investment strategy based on Twitter. During a four-month simulation, his approach outperformed other baseline strategies and indexes, including the Dow Jones industrial average, by between 1.4 percent and 11 percent. “A model that predicts the stock market,” Hristidis said, “can only be successful as long as people don’t know about it.”

Flame - when countries do the hacking

BBC News Technology 28 May 2012 Last updated at 13:17 GMT Flame: Massive cyber-attack discovered, researchers say By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News A complex targeted cyber-attack that collected private data from countries such as Israel and Iran has been uncovered, researchers have said. Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs told the BBC they believed the malware, known as Flame, had been operating since August 2010. The company said it believed the attack was state-sponsored, but could not be sure of its exact origins. They described Flame as "one of the most complex threats ever discovered". Research into the attack was carried out in conjunction with the UN's International Telecommunication Union. They had been investigating another malware threat, known as Wiper, which was reportedly deleting data on machines in western Asia. In the past, targeted malware - such as Stuxnet - has targeted nuclear infrastructure in Iran. Others like Duqu have sought to infiltrate networks in order to steal data. This new threat appears not to cause physical damage, but to collect huge amounts of sensitive information, said Kaspersky's chief malware expert Vitaly Kamluk. "Once a system is infected, Flame begins a complex set of operations, including sniffing the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard, and so on," he said. More than 600 specific targets were hit, Mr Kamluk said, ranging from individuals, businesses, academic institutions and government systems. Iran's National Computer Emergency Response Team posted a security alert stating that it believed Flame was responsible for "recent incidents of mass data loss" in the country. The malware code itself is 20MB in size - making it some 20 times larger than the Stuxnet virus. The researchers said it could take several years to analyse. Iran and Israel Mr Kamluk said the size and sophistication of Flame suggested it was not the work of independent cybercriminals, and more likely to be government-backed. He explained: "Currently there are three known classes of players who develop malware and spyware: hacktivists, cybercriminals and nation states. "Flame is not designed to steal money from bank accounts. It is also different from rather simple hack tools and malware used by the hacktivists. So by excluding cybercriminals and hacktivists, we come to conclusion that it most likely belongs to the third group." Among the countries affected by the attack are Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. "The geography of the targets and also the complexity of the threat leaves no doubt about it being a nation-state that sponsored the research that went into it," Mr Kamluk said. The malware is capable of recording audio via a microphone, before compressing it and sending it back to the attacker. It is also able to take screenshots of on-screen activity, automatically detecting when "interesting" programs - such as email or instant messaging - were open. 'Industrial vacuum cleaner' Kaspersky's first recorded instance of Flame is in August 2010, although it said it is highly likely to have been operating earlier. Prof Alan Woodward, from the Department of Computing at the University of Surrey said the attack is very significant. "This is basically an industrial vacuum cleaner for sensitive information," he told the BBC. He explained that unlike Stuxnet, which was designed with one specific task in mind, Flame was much more sophisticated. "Whereas Stuxnet just had one purpose in life, Flame is a toolkit, so they can go after just about everything they can get their hands on." Once the initial Flame malware has infected a machine, additional modules can be added to perform specific tasks - almost in the same manner as adding apps to a smartphone. More Technology stories Samsung Galaxy S3 phoneSamsung Galaxy S3 launch delays Samsung says there will be a short supply of blue models of its new smartphone in order to meet internal quality standards. Self-drive 'convoy' hits the road Facebook phone 'due next year' BBC BBC © 2012 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

O2 mobile wallet app launches text message payments

O2 mobile wallet app launches text message payments O2 Wallet The app has a range of services, including a money management facility Continue reading the main story Related Stories UK moves closer to mobile wallet Google to show off mobile wallet In search of the mobile wallet Mobile network O2 has launched a smartphone app that allows users to transfer up to £500 via text message. It also allows customers to "digitise" their debit and credit cards to speed up purchases from online stores. The firm also intends to allow users of phones with near-field communication (NFC) chips to make contactless payments in high street shops. It is the latest of several firms to charge retailers a transaction fee for making it easier to shop. The service will be free to consumers at first, but O2 said that it would charge 15p for each money message sent by text at a later date. The network provider said that more than 100 retailers had agreed to accept payments from the service. They include Debenhams, Comet, Sainsbury's Direct and Tesco Direct. Users can also benefit from a search facility that compares how much goods cost, the ability to load money onto the app from their debit cards and a "transaction history" that keeps track of what they have spent. The firm said it had held off introducing contactless payments as only a handful of retailers had installed the necessary systems. Continue reading the main story image of Rory Cellan-Jones Analysis Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent Every week seems to bring news of a mobile money product launch - but so far British consumers have proved lukewarm about the idea that their phones can substitute for their wallets. What's intriguing about O2's new venture is that it's the biggest attempt so far by a mobile operator, rather than a bank or credit card issuer, to enter this market. In developing countries like Kenya it is mobile firms which have successfully pioneered mobile money innovation - but that's because products are aimed at the many who don't have bank accounts. In the UK, where that isn't the case, O2 will have to convince customers that their money is safe on their mobiles. If and when UK phone users do get enthusiastic about mobile money, there's a very lucrative business opportunity - and mobile operators will find themselves in a battle with the banks to grasp it. Read more from Rory It added that it was also in discussions with a rail operator to add a button to buy train tickets. Security risks James Le Brocq, managing director at O2 Money said: "We believe it will transform the way people manage their finances and spend money." One of the biggest stumbling blocks for uptake of such technology is fears about security. He noted that all personal details, pin codes, passwords and other financial data were held on remote central servers rather than on the mobile device. "O2 wallet has been trialled internally for months and has undergone extensive 'stress-testing' with security experts," he added. "This is, we believe, the safest and most secure way to deliver mobile payment services." Project Oscar Eden Zoller, analyst at Ovum, said the service was part of a wider plan. O2 and its rivals Vodafone and EverythingEverywhere are working on a national mobile payments service - dubbed Project Oscar. They had hoped to have it up and running in time for the London Olympics. But the project is held up in Brussels, subject to an anti-competitive investigation. "For O2 if this project is in danger of being stalled or even derailed it make sense to move ahead with a solo initiative," said Ms Zoller. Phone with O2 Wallet app opened The app can also scan barcodes and search for cheaper products It is not the first time O2 has experimented with mobile wallets. In 2009 it tested using mobiles as an Oyster card replacement to pay for travel on London's Underground network. Last summer saw the launch of the UK's first mobile payment service with Orange and Barclaycard teaming up to offer contactless payments in a range of stores, including Pret a Manger, Little Chef and the National Trust. Juniper Research estimates that one in six mobile devices will be NFC-enabled by 2014. O2 currently has 200,000 customers with NFC-enabled phones in the UK.

nokia + windows = disaster

Investors losing faith that Nokia can stop the rot
By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI | Thu Apr 12, 2012 11:07am EDT

(Reuters) - Ailing cellphone maker Nokia has the cash to survive seven quarters like the last, but investors are losing faith that it can break the vicious circle that keeps customers and in turn application developers from its new phones.

Chief Executive Stephen Elop, who joined from Microsoft in 2010, gambled last year that ditching Nokia's homegrown Symbian phone software in favor of a largely untried version from his old employer would put the company back in the driving seat.

On Wednesday it warned that it would make losses in the first two quarters of this year, after demand for the moribund Symbian phones collapsed, while sales of its new Windows Phone models are a long way short of compensating.

The market took fright when Elop made the decision, and tumbled again on the loss warnings. Any investors still holding the stock after a year-long white-knuckle ride have lost two-thirds of their investment. On Thursday, the stock was down about 7 percent after a 15 percent fall a day earlier.

Despite getting the new Windows Phone models out at breakneck speed, it has sold fewer than expected, as consumers remain wedded to Apple's iPhones or Samsung models running Google's Android system, both of which come with a bigger range of applications supported by a much larger population of developers.

"It is too early to write Nokia off," said analyst Peter Cunningham at Canalys. "It is still in the middle of its transition to Windows Phone, but it doesn't have the luxury of time. The next six months will be critical in the company's long-term future. The Lumia 610 needs to be a success, and it needs some hit products in the market in time for Christmas."

VOLUMES

In the first quarter Nokia sold just over 2 million Lumia phones, compared with expected sales of 31 million iPhones and the 37 million smartphones Samsung is expected to sell in the quarter, according to a Reuters poll.

The market consensus is that it needs to sell 27 million this year, 55 million next year, and 94 million in 2014, according to analysts polled by Reuters.

"If they can show the volume, then the next Nokia tune is 'Stairway to Heaven'. If not, it is 'How Low Can You Go', or 'Bye Bye Baby'," said John Strand, founder of Danish research firm Strand Consult.

To make the volumes, the company needs to resolve a Catch-22 dilemma; to sell more phones, you need more apps, but to attract app developers, you need to sell more phones.

There are about 80,000 applications that owners of models running Windows Phone can enjoy, a drop in the ocean compared with the half a billion available to Apple and Android users.

Nokia burned through 700 million euros of cash in the first quarter, leaving 4.9 billion euros ($6.4 billion) at the end of March, but as its share price tumbles, it might run out of time before it runs out of cash.

Its market value, about a tenth of its recent peak in 2007, the year the iPhone stormed the market, is just 11.3 billion euros, making it increasingly attractive as a takeover target, though industry followers said predators would likely move only after some evidence that the Windows Phone strategy was working.

A Reuters poll showed Nokia likely lost its position as the world's largest cellphone maker in the first quarter to rival Samsung Electronics, after dominating the market for 14 years.

"At the moment it seems that the strategic decisions were not correct," said Timo Rothovius, Chairman of the Finnish Shareholders Union, which represents small-cap local investors who have increased their holdings during the freefall.

"It might be that the Windows phones still take off, but at the moment it is hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Something radical has to be done. The company's credibility in the market is weak, and it suggests that maybe betting everything on one card wasn't a good thing," Rothovius said.

(Additional reporting by Eero Vassinen and Terhi Kinnunen in Helsinki and Georgina Prodhan in London; Editing by Will Waterman)

Is facbeook making us lonely?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.
By Stephen Marche

Image credit: Phillip Toledano

Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook’s scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.

Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film’s most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program specifies that you should include only “your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.” That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.

Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.

We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.

Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: “How often do you feel …?” As in: “How often do you feel that you are ‘in tune’ with the people around you?” And: “How often do you feel that you lack companionship?” Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.

The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only under certain circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one’s spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. “The mere belief in God,” the researchers concluded, “was relatively independent of loneliness.”

But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.”

Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.

We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.

The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?

Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox.” A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the study—high-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boards—were statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled “Who Uses Facebook?,” found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall.

Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that she’s at whatever concert she happens to be at. That’s what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.

Still, Burke’s research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn’t that make people feel lonely? “If people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen,” Burke tells me. “They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated.”

Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.

John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: “When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.

To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook’s effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. “For the most part,” he says, “people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.” The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

“Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly,” Cacioppo continues. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.” But hasn’t the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. “That’s because of how we use cars,” Cacioppo replies. “How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation.”

The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of people’s connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: “Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view.” I have to wonder: What other point of view is meaningful?

Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It’s faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself.

Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into “the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” Most goals in life show a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don’t value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing conclusion:

Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms.

The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook—neither of them a Luddite—concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’”

Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.”

Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickers’s computer was on when she died.

Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/
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