Are Humans Still Social Creatures?

I’m sure you’ve heard the age-old adage, “humans are social creatures.” As a human and sociologist, I can say with near certainty, that that is true indeed. Even now, in a generation plagued with social anxiety (more on this later), we are finding new ways to define and redefine what it means to be “social.” It’s changing everyday. For example, does going Live on Instagram weekly, or even daily, qualify as being social? Regardless of your individual answer, I can guarantee you that there is someone out there with a different one, which means that the definition of what it means to be social is no longer universal. There was a time before the telephone–though no living person can recall it–and then, physical interaction was all people had. Previous generations had to see one another in order to speak. Just imagine that (I didn’t have a cell phone until high school and I can’t even imagine a world without texting). More recently, technological advancements and–thanks to my alma mater, UCLA–the internet made it possible to interact from great distances. First, there was email, and I, admittedly, missed that wave. Then there came instant messaging (IM), and that was my era. Shout out to all of my fellow AIM users out there! Although we are still in the IM era, you no longer have to know an individual personally in order to gain access to their screen or username, and instant message them. Usernames are incredibly accessible, thanks to our many search features. This has also prompted me to think about how definitions and understandings of privacy have changed as well. I mean, you can DM (direct message) the President. Sure, he can ignore your message, but there is now way to preemptively stop you from reaching out. Even having connections on the other side of the world requires zero effort these days. Socializing with someone in Kenya or Greece is as easy as socializing with a person in the next city over. Through your posts, you can have social media followers who know exactly what your home or city look like without ever having set foot in either.

But with all pros, there are bound to be a few cons. Social media has not only made the world smaller, it has also given us the capacity to share ourselves with the world, including our ideas, thoughts, opinions, and knowledge–irrespective of how limited it might be. We are constantly being warned of the dangers of social media, and the internet in general, especially with regard to the news. At the start of his term, our president set out on a mission to disqualify and denigrate all news outlets, particularly those that tend to be left-leaning. “Fake news! Fake news!” he’d scream to anyone who’d listen. What he failed to realize was that millennials aren’t really getting their information from traditional news outlets. Not necessarily because we distrust it (though we do), but because we don’t really watch TV in the first place. Plus, the news is just inundated with heart-breaking content. Watching the news is a torturous activity. You walk away from it feeling like no good thing ever happens to anyone in this country. Every segment is full of constant reminders that there is someone lurking around the corner waiting to kill us all, yet somehow “experts” are still mystified by what is causing the rise in anxiety and depression *hard eye roll*. But that is neither here nor there.

Ultimately, millennials and the generation z get their news from social media. When you hear a 20-something say they read an article, they are more than likely referring to something they found on Twitter. As a researcher, I am still looking for ways to distinguish the peer-reviewed academic research articles I read and write from the others. Why? Because anyone can write an article and post it on the internet. The article could be full of false claims and lies, but there isn’t anything anyone can do about it beyond complaining, or screaming “Fake news” to anyone who will listen.

Sure, this era is full of false truths, but why would we expect otherwise? Generally, people want to be seen and heard and there have never been more opportunities to make that happen than in today’s society. The issue really isn’t the increase in opportunity, but the inability to enable large-scale quality control checks (though Facebook is apparently trying really really hard to do so). Anyone can say anything, and they/we do. Given the drastic increase in social networking services within the past decade, we might be compelled to believe that there are more opinions today than there have ever been, but that would (probably) be untrue. What’s changed, or expanded rather, are the available mediums through which opinions can be shared with the public. We’ve got Youtube, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, TicToc, etc. etc. and most young people have active accounts with each platform. This brings me back to the title of this article, are we still social creatures? If more than 90% of 18-29 year olds in the U.S. are using Youtube and Facebook on a daily basis, does that alter our understanding of what it means to be social?…And if it doesn’t, should it? I would argue that it should. (It should also change the way that we understand what it means to be an expert. Any person, who has the time, can learn virtually (pun intended) any skill known to (wo)man without any official training, thanks to Youtube University.) Theoretically, if you ever wanted to instantly share an idea or thought that had the capacity to reach millions, you could easily download Twitter to your smartphone, and boom, instant virality. Granted, it is much more difficult to “go viral” today than it was 10 years ago, thanks to capitalism. Like most other things that capitalism has gotten its’ dirty little hands on, social media has begun to fall short of its’ potential for the everyday sharer. The “organic” reach that we all knew and loved is gone, only to be replaced by something much more sinister–inorganic reach! Not only is it much more difficult to grow your platform by reaching strangers, but it’s even become nearly impossible to ensure that what you share connects with the people you already know. We are all familiar with the infamous algorithm…whatever it means, and we aren’t happy about it, but our dissatisfaction hasn’t turned us off social media. Even the incessant ads and pop-ups haven’t turned us away, and I doubt that anything else will anytime soon. We’re too deep in. Sure, we’d all like to think that we have the discipline to simply delete apps off of our phones, and voilà, we’ve ridded ourselves of the hold that social media has on our lives, but this just isn’t the truth. If you’ve ever deleted Instagram or Facebook from your phone only to re-download it a week, or even a day, later don’t feel bad, because again, we are by nature social creatures. In that time you probably felt like you were missing out on your family and friends’ lives. Whether or not we care to admit it, social media has a monopoly on our time use, and has become our primary outlet for socializing. If you go days or weeks without social media, especially after having previously used it daily, you are–by this new definition–prohibiting yourself from socializing. You’ve essentially become anti-social. It’s why acronyms like FOMO were created after all. The fear of missing out is a real thing, and a source of anxiety for a lot of young people.