Is there a connection between social media use and loneliness? In this episode of Frontiers in Health & Happiness, we explore this question with Dr. Jeffrey Hall, a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, and a former Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.
Ayla Fudala: Hello and welcome to Frontiers in Health & Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My name is Ayla Fudala, Center Communications Coordinator, and I'll be asking experts how to live a healthy and happy life.
As loneliness and social media use have both risen, many have wondered if the two are connected. Does social media use increase loneliness, or diminish it? I’ll be exploring that question today with Dr. Jeffrey Hall, an expert in the intersection of social media and loneliness. Dr. Hall is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, and formerly served as Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.
Ayla Fudala: Okay, so my first question is, has the rise of social media created the loneliness epidemic?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: So overwhelmingly, research suggests that the loneliness epidemic, if we want to call it that, preceded the rise of social and mobile media. So specifically, if we look at the rise of loneliness that we're seeing in young adults specifically, that started happening before social and mobile media. We also need to ask the question of whether or not loneliness is specifically related to social media. It has a very weak association, and by some measures has no association whatsoever. So it's very unlikely that loneliness was created, and certainly not at the epidemic level, by social and mobile media.
Ayla Fudala: Does social media satisfy the need to belong?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: At kind of a basic level, I would say that probably not, in the broader sense of the need to belong being something that it exists your whole life. As a part of human thriving social media probably is not a major factor in being able to get your needs satisfied on connection specifically. Something important to keep in mind is that for certain practices of social media use, there are ways on momentary levels or daily levels for feeling more connected, feeling inspired by people, feeling part of a broader community. And those things are very important, especially for people who need a sense of community or feel isolated. However, we want to be careful about thinking that social media plays an enormous role in either loneliness or in connection. It's probably a minor player in a much bigger stage.
Ayla Fudala: Is it possible for social media to help people who are very isolated and lonely?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: I think it can. The stories that I think that we can see that make a big difference is when people are geographically isolated from people either they love and care about or if they're trying to find their identity, explore who they are, and they geographically don't have people around them who they feel as if they can connect with or understand. Social media can play a role in bridging those divides in a very palpable sense. Now, this doesn't mean necessarily that everyone who goes online or goes on social media are able to find that community. It doesn't mean that social media are perfectly equipped or well equipped, even, to create that sense of connection. I certainly think that the rise of TikTok is not conducive to more social interaction or social connectedness. So there's a lot of possibilities where it could contribute to a sense of connection. But there's a lot of ways in which it's unlikely to make a big difference in the broader scheme.
Ayla Fudala: Can social media be harmful to people? And if so, any demographics in particular?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: I think there's no question that social media has a lot of possibility for harm to be carried through. We can look at issues around misinformation, hate speech. There are plenty of places in which social media can be a source of negative or incorrect or inaccurate information. I think it's also worthwhile to point out that there's a lot of functions that social media have, which are similar to what we might see associated with negative associations with things around television or advertising, such as women's body image, or having a distorted sense of body satisfaction. Social media is an extension of old media, and old media have always played a role in perpetuating heterosexism and sexist attitudes. We can see that social media can also be a source of creating those same dynamics.
But I think a more important question is, is our social media uniquely creating those dynamics? Does it uniquely cause these sorts of things? I think that's a much more complicated answer, because there's a lot of good evidence that Broadcast News, for example, also propagates information that's inaccurate, spreads misinformation. We also know that there are a lot of ways in which to get content online. That is not social media. That is just plain false. So in some sense, whether social media is uniquely contributing to this ecosystem is hard to say. But can it be used in ways which are harmful or hurtful to others? No question.
Ayla Fudala: You came to Harvard from the University of Kansas, where you direct the Relationships and Technology Lab. Can you tell me more about that and how it relates to loneliness and social connection?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: Yeah. So the Arc lab really looks at questions that have to do with this idea of offline-online communication. I tend to be a little different than a lot of researchers that are either studying interpersonal communication or researchers that are studying social media, in that I'm very interested in the ways that our offline and online lives overlap, how they complement each other, how they substitute for one another or displace one another. So I'm very fascinated by how social media is part of our broader kind of social ecology in which we live. So the questions that the Relationship and Technology Lab pursue are very much questions that are around my theory that communicate beyond belong theory, around questions of displacement and social displacement. Digital stress is another area that I spend time on, but all of it is a place in which my graduate students and I can thrive and work together on projects that we care about.
Ayla Fudala: Can you tell me about your work here at the Harvard Law School, where you're currently serving as a visiting scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society? What is the Berkman Klein Center all about and what do you do there?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: The Berkman Klein Center. I got to be here in the very first week, which was their 25th anniversary. So they have been around for 25 years studying issues around internet and society, around content moderation, around open access, around artificial intelligence issues, around privacy and moderation. They have been a major player for a very long time, and contributing to studies of internet technology policy and broader questions about kind of social governance and social media world.
So my work there for the last year--and I This is my last week here in Boston at Harvard. It's been a really great year, was really exploring an idea very specifically about whether or not there are positive ways to use social media. So that was my project that I came here to explore, and I spent a lot of this year sort of fleshing out these ideas, writing papers, engaging with other scholars to understand those things.
Ayla Fudala: And are there positive ways to use social media?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: Absolutely. So in my book Relating Through Technology, I end with four suggestions about how we can use social media in more positive ways. The first is to tighten the circle. The concept there is to talk and spend time with the people who we love and care about the most. Keep in touch with your friends. Reach out to your family. Make sure you're prioritizing the way that you spend time, your free time, your leisure time, to connect with one another. The second thing is to strengthen the signal. Following someone on social media or attending to what they're posting on social media is good. Following group chats is a little bit better. A small group communication, like a group of friends or otherwise talking together, is a little better. One on one text is a little better, video chats a little better than that, phone calls are a little better than that, and face to face interaction is the best.
Ayla Fudala: When you say better, does that mean better for promoting social connection, promoting well-being, staving off loneliness?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: Yeah. I mean, the question of loneliness makes it a little trickier. In the case of face-to-face interaction, there's very good evidence that face-to-face interaction matters for mitigating loneliness when it comes to promoting connection. I think all of these things play a small role, and they go up a ladder of higher and higher levels of connection. You know, some have argued that that's due to the fact that we tend to restrict our phone calls with people who we love and care about. It's not often people are making phone calls to strangers. That makes sense. And that texting, you know, it tends to have a greater effect than social media, partly because it's actually communication that's back and forth between individuals rather than mass broadcast of information to a large group of people. But the broader kind of way that I like to think of it is, is that when you want to want to promote connection, you can think of it as improving the quality of your kind of daily affirmation to your micro connections that you can build through mediated practice.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you. Your 2020 book, Relating Through Technology, received two top book awards from the National Communication Association. What are the major points that you hope readers will take away from the book?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: That is a really good question. Uh, let's see if I can remember what, uh, would be the best way to summarize that book in a concise sort of way? Um, you know what? I really I think the best way to explain this is that relating through technology is trying to integrate two spheres of research that I'm part of. One is interpersonal communication, and one of the top book awards came from that division. And the other way is human communication and technology. And so the two of them are brought together in the book by trying to say that our mediated practices are part of our offline relationships with each other, that our mediated practices play a role in facilitating relationship development and online dating, and all the ways in which that we can be connected to each other. So each one of the chapters fleshes out different parts of what it means to be connected through technology. It also puts aside some of the most alarmist rhetoric about what it means to use social media. It explores the idea of digital stress, which is to not give our mediated practices a pass, but to understand them in relation to our coping mechanisms. It looks at digital displacement. So the idea, are we losing face to face connection because of social media. So It tries to cover a lot of the major questions and controversies around whether or not this offline-online divide is beneficial to individuals, or if it's harmful.
Ayla Fudala: You have a new book coming out next year with Yale University Press titled The Social Biome. What should readers expect?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: I am so excited to be sharing this book next year with my co-author, Andy Morella, who has been just a terrific friend and collaborator for all of these years. He and I actually coined the concept “the social biome” in a paper we did in 2020. And the idea here is that we are part of a social system that we create through our communication actions, or the way that we talk to one another and the kind of relationships that we have, but also that there are social pressures upon us that change and constrain the ways that we can communicate. It has to do with our communities, the kind of obligations that we have to one another, our workplaces. So the idea of the social biome is that we are both part of our social system and we are responding to our social system, and through that we actually develop social health. So the whole concept of the book is ways to promote social health and understand our social health, while really embracing the idea that it's very difficult to do so, that there are inherent challenges to communication and relationship building that we have to be sensitive to, to understand why people don't take the time to develop relationships with each other.
Ayla Fudala: Is there a healthy way to use social media?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: One thing to think about is that social media is part of your broader media diet, and keeping an eye on whether or not the way that you consume media is consistent with your goals or the way that you want to use your time--something to be attentive to. So if you find yourself engaging in certain platforms or certain types of content that aren't consistent with what you want to be doing with your time, that don't make you feel good or don't make you feel like you're really meaningfully connecting with each other or even managing your mood, then I think that there are important ways to create boundaries and limits on the way that you go about consuming media. So on one hand, I want to really say, if people out there are feeling like they want to curtail their social media or any media use for that matter, I think that that's a good idea; that that’s your body and your brain's way of telling you “Should we set limits on that?”
On the other hand, I always like to say that on some level, media is for hedonism, it's for pleasure. And it would be a great thing if what made us feel good would also be good for us in the long run. But those things are not always lined up. So don't blame yourself or be mad at yourself for actually enjoying those guilty pleasure television shows, or watching the cat videos, or the otters who learned how to clap. There's nothing wrong with all of that. But on the other hand, if it's not consistent with your goals or how you want to be using your time, be sensitive to that and try to take steps to change.
Ayla Fudala: What is digital thriving?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: Digital thriving is the idea that we can choose to use and develop patterns of use of mobile and social media in ways that will actually lead us to live a more connected and more meaningful existence. And digital thriving really requires us to take ownership over our actions and how we treat one another in ways that allow us to use those tools to their full potential. So digital thriving is not something that's likely to be able to be achieved easily. And for some folks, it may not be able to be achieved at all, because in some ways, your digital thriving is contingent on having meaningful and close relationships with other people that you can communicate with and you can reach out for. On the other hand, there's always the possibility of traversing space and geographic constraints to make new relationships, to date, to fall in love, and to actually contribute to your broader sense of well-being.
Ayla Fudala: When you feel lonely, what do you do?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: You know, it's always good to ask researchers how they use their own research to inform their practices. One of the things I've come to appreciate is we've gone a long way in discussing the importance that we need to destigmatize loneliness. If you feel like you're lonely, to destigmatize admitting that you're lonely. And I think that's important. But I might go one step further. I actually think that the feeling of loneliness means you have a functional social system. It means your body is working with you to try to prompt you to take action, to do something about that loneliness. In some ways, we want to thank ourselves, our brain and our bodies for alerting us that this is something that we need to be working on, because social relationships are just so important for our long term health and well-being, our rates of mortality and morbidity. So for myself, because I study these things, when I feel lonely or disconnected, a lot of times I'm reminded to engage in the things that I know to be useful practices. I send short messages to my friends and say, I miss you or thinking of you. You know, it's been a long time since we talked. I try to make plans, so I reach out to my friends who live in the Kansas area and I say, hey, let's all get together for dinner again. It's been months since the last time we saw each other. I email somebody from work and say, hey, do you have time later this week to have lunch? I make plans, I respond in the moment, and I think about my long-term sense of connection when I feel lonely, because I understand that although those things may not make me feel less lonely right now, they're likely to keep me at a higher state of connection throughout my days and throughout my months and weeks. And so I'd like to thank my earlier self for having made those plans that I get to enjoy them, but they only get made if I take those steps.
Ayla Fudala: In your work, you’ve compared loneliness to hunger and mentioned something called social snacking. Can you speak more about that?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: The social snacking idea comes from the concept that there are little forms of communication that we can ingest that remind us of our social connectedness without actually engaging in social behavior, like an interpersonal interaction, for example. The earliest studies on social snacking, which I just loved, considered the idea that you can look at pictures of your friends and family, you can kind of meditate on the feelings that you have of connection to people that you love, and that those little reminders that you are connected can actually stave off feelings of ostracism or feeling like you're excluded from others. But I take the social snacking metaphor one step further, which is to suggest that social media may be a form of social snacking, and that if your entire diet consists of snacks, you're probably not going to be fully nourished. But the snacks themselves are just ways in which that we can temporarily make up for a feeling of disconnection. We can turn on social media to what's going on with the people that we care about, or learning news about the things that we're interested in. It’s a way of finding that little snack in a moment when we may not have a connection that we'd like to have.
Ayla Fudala: I've heard people compare social media to junk food.
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: I don't think that that's wrong. I mean, I think that it's not wrong to compare it to junk food. I learned something very important from colleagues who study nutrition, in the debate related to hyperpalatable foods. So the argument of hyperpalatable foods says, well, we do not want to eat chips or soda or snacks or things that are really super delicious. High in fat, high in sugar, high in salt. They're not good for you in the long run. But one of the things that I thought was really insightful was it said that, on the other hand, hyperpalatable foods may be the only food that somebody has. Maybe they live in a food desert. Maybe they can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables because they're very expensive. Maybe they’re the only types of foods that they can have in their home, or ones that don't decompose and don't require refrigeration. And I think that we should have sensitivity to the idea that hyperpalatable foods are not ideal, but they may be all that someone's got. So in some sense, I don't disagree that social media could be seen as kind of a snack, you know, a not totally healthy thing to be having if it's your only part of your diet. But the value of that snack for you is highly dependent on what you already have available to you. So if you are a person with lots of social connection, you have a lot of relationships, probably social media is not going to really matter that much. That snack is not going to hurt you. But if you're somebody who really needs to find human connection, you really need to deeply be able to find someone in your life that can help you feel connected. Social media alone is not going to get you there, but it's better than nothing.
Ayla Fudala: In the past, you've said that loneliness is self-perpetuating. Can you please explain further?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: So researchers who are much, much better than me, people like John Cassiopeia, who not only literally wrote the book on loneliness, but really was a major force in understanding its impact, made arguments to say that there are a whole bunch of things that lonely people do which discount their ability to be more social in the future. They tend to think that they have less to offer. They turn down opportunities to interact with other people. They show non-verbal signs to the people around them that they don't want to be bothered. They don't want to be invited. They do a lot of things that actually make it difficult for them to be able to reengage socially with others, and Cassiopeia, amongst others studying evolutionary models, suggest that this is actually designed to be able to further protect a person from harm. So in some ways, by detecting ostracism and a deep sense in which that they're not welcome, highly lonely people also engage in behaviors to further protect themselves from harm, but that also further pull them away from the people who might help them feel reconnected. So what's really unfortunate about loneliness is that it's really hard to change the behavior when your perceptual mechanisms are telling you you really shouldn't, or you're not worth it.
Ayla Fudala: If you ran the US government, what policy changes around social media companies would you make?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: That's a great question. So one of the benefits of being at the Berkman Klein Center over the years, there's been so much robust conversation about what's the role of governance. You know, the Berkman Center has opened my eyes to how important it is that we think big about what possibly could be done. And there are three changes that I think might make an effect on making social media an ally rather than a potential obstacle to us getting our social needs met. And the three are these:
The first is, we need more competition. You know what I've really learned by watching social media companies change over the years is that some of the ways that we would still love to be using social media, social media companies change and no longer let us use them anymore. They change their interface. They change the way that they present information, they change their feed, they change all kinds of things, and we can't change it back. So without competition, then we really don't have a lot of options that might better promote social connection. And there are certainly ways to imagine social connection is something that people are trying to use social media to accomplish. There's good reason to believe that people are pulling away from social networking sites and are actually moving to small group chats to have the same kind of interaction they used to have, but they're just having it in private. That means there's a high demand out there for people to have a socially connected experience, even if it's one that can't be seen by everybody.
The second that I would add is that once you have competition, you have to have portability. People should be able to take their social media account, their profile, their information, their things that they've posted that they want to keep, the kind of connections they have, and move them from one platform to the next. That interoperability, I know, is a major challenge. And my colleagues who are more technologically sophisticated than I am have pointed out there are privacy issues that need to be navigated. What exactly is the thing that's portable? How do you own your data? All major questions, but I think that there's reason to think that if we actually were able to move platform to platform, then we wouldn't be beholden to platforms. If they made these major changes, we could just go to another one that was better.
The last one that I'd add is, I think I have really come around to the idea that we need to have access to a basic social media functionality, short messaging service that is free and accessible to everybody and not based on us having our data sold to advertisers. I've been making jokes with some people around the BKC, as my ideas have been germinating. What I'm looking for is a short message service, which has texting, Facebook functionality circa 2012, and something like Reddit, which allows for posting and sharing information amongst communities. And I believe that those three things could be part of a basic social media infrastructure that's free and accessible to all Americans, without commercial content, without advertising, without anything. And I think if we were as a country to accept that those were goals and values in the same way that we think it's valuable for people to have access to a telephone and a mail address, like a physical address, then I think we could make a big difference in people's well-being.
Ayla Fudala: My final question is, do you have any thoughts on the podcast medium? Do you think listening to podcasts can satisfy the need to belong?
Dr. Jeffrey Hall: I have found that podcasts have taken off just amazingly. I was an NPR listener for a very long time, when I had to drive longer distances in places where I commuted a lot more. I certainly understand the value of listening to other people tell stories and share experiences and learning news. I just had no idea the podcast was going to get as big as it has. I think that probably a podcast is a good use of time. You'll learn a lot of things. You get to meet new people, you get to hear some interesting voices and perspectives that you might not normally hear. Whether it actually, in itself, promotes well-being and happiness-- well, I guess we'll find out.
Ayla Fudala: As I reflect on my initial question, about whether social media use can increase loneliness, it becomes clear that the issue is highly complex, and that there is no simple answer. The rise of social media did not create the loneliness epidemic—that preceded it. There are many examples pointing to both beneficial and harmful impacts of social media, but averaged out, the association between social media and loneliness is weak.
Personally, I find that the most helpful way to consider the issue is through the metaphor of social snacking, of social media as junk food. Can it get you that quick sense of connection you’re looking for? Yes. Is consuming only social media healthy in the long run? No, in-person social interactions will always be better. But sometimes it’s the only option you have. And when you do have other options, just be mindful of how you spend your time, and remember to use social media as a supplement for in-person social interactions, not a replacement.
In the next episode of our Loneliness and Well-being Series, I will be speaking about loneliness and health equity with someone very close to home: Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, Professor of Social Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is truly an expert in his field, having taught at Harvard for more than 30 years, since 1992.
New episodes will air every two weeks. Episodes can be found on the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness website and YouTube channel, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and just about anywhere else podcasts are found.
This has been another episode of Frontiers in Health & Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To learn about upcoming events, visit our website, sign up for our mailing list, and follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. Thank you for listening!