Alone, all alone in a world packed with internet friends

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Women have more friends than men; they spend more time cultivating friendships and work harder to keep them. Men move in smaller circles – and sometimes no circle at all.

That’s according to a recent UK study that found that one-fifth of men questioned had no close friends at all with the corresponding figure for women not far off half that percentage.

And yet Facebook would tell us we’ve more friends than any generation since Adam ate the apple (an actual apple, not the tablet named after said fruit on which you store all your electronic ‘friends’).

The definition of friendship would suggest it’s very hard to claim you are one with a person you’ve never met – and yet Facebook does just that, offering you unlimited acquaintances, none of whom you’d recognise if you bumped into them on the street.

So, does this suggest that social media friends are replacing actual people?

Or in a world where we can reach out to people on the other side of the planet at the touch of a thumb, are we actually becoming more insular and self-centred than ever before?

There was a time when your friends were people who lived near you or you went to school with; your social circle didn’t extend too far beyond the radius of the area you could walk to.

And maybe it’s rose-tinted hindsight, but very few people seemed all that lonely as a result.

Now we have unlimited potential for an infinite number of friends – and yet this UK poll by YouGov found that 18 per cent of men did not have a single close friend and 32 per cent admitted they had no one they counted as a best friend.

And while women fared better, even then twelve per cent said they did not have close friends and 24 per cent lacked a best friend.

The online survey found that men were less likely to say they felt lonely; 44 per cent were lonely sometimes, often or all of the time, compared with 50 per cent of women.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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