Issue 01 - Loneliness

“WE CAPTURE A CONTEXTUALIZING,
AFFECTIVE MOMENT THROUGH
TRUST IN TECHNOLOGY,”
Although now, some time later, I’m scarcely able to pinpoint all of the non-biological stressors
that contributed to my anxiety, in the moment I was certain about one thing: limiting
social media use. Before even arriving on campus, I had already gained hundreds of mutual
followers on Instagram via the class page on Facebook. Excited by the idea of meeting
people unlike those from my rural hometown, these online connections did not appear
unusual to me. Upon walking to class, however, I was taken aback by the multiple people I
would run into who referred to me by my username. Friendships would develop through
real life interactions, only to have it later revealed that those same people already had an
idea of me through social media. “I didn’t want it to be weird,” one girl later conceded. All
judgment suspended, it still felt weird.
These awkward situations are symptomatic of my generation, “Generation Z.” The age
group which market research suggests has a preference for emojis over text, and entertains
the impulse to consume information as quickly as possible. Patience and rumination are
characteristics which, although approved in the abstract, lose ground to more instantly
negotiable gratifications. To swiftly navigate the digital era is potentially to have everything:
the world at your fingertips; validation at a whim.
“We capture a contextualizing, affective moment through trust in technology,” contends
digital rhetoric professor, Aaron Hess. “The intersection of body and machine, of analog
and digital, enables users to generate new perceptions of both the self and the device.” But
what happens when the digital mindset is imposed onto the physical world? What happens
when young adults become preoccupied with manipulating photographs to fit an unobtainable
image? We begin to neglect the people we are in real life.
This was the case for me, and thus I adopted the philosophy that if I had only spoken to
someone a handful of times or no longer saw them on a regular basis, then I was not
obligated to follow them. Being informed about these people’s lives from social media
posts as opposed to in-person interaction felt ingenuine, especially considering most of
them lived within a five block vicinity. By the end of the school year, I had unfollowed over
200 students.
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