Is Social Media Making Us Less Social?

The numbers in the article show us quite clearly that people in our society by many metrics are becoming lonlier year after year. We are alone more often and feel lonelier overall than the population did last time the survey was done. Since the technological boom in households, people have opted to interact with their gadgets more than with other people. Now the question this article proposes 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?" I am thinking that Social Media actually makes us less social overall, despite having the name "social media". After reading the article, its easy to see how social media better enables extroverts to socialize and talk to other people. But the problem here is that the extroverts were already social to begin with. I think that social media actually decreases the social ability and social confidence of other introverts as opposed to increasing social interaction like it should. Why? Well we see in the article that the less social people spend on average more time on Facebook than other people who have more friends. This is  a bad thing because it gives those people the sense of having more friends and social interaction, but in reality they have little friends whom they can really trust and confide in. So Facebook is actually misleading them quite a bit. Think about how many friends you have on Facebook, now think about how many of them you actually know, now what about those that you talk to on a regular basis, and then finally how many of those would you comfortably confide in? And what is worse is that the article showed that people are depressed and discouraged when they see that others have a much larger social network they theirs. This is a toxic environment for introverts who are less shy and already less confident about themselves. Facebook boosts the confidence of people who are popular (shown by the large amount of like they receive for any wall post) while giving less social people the impression that they are very lonely by virtue of comparison. So now, even though that introvert may have the same number of friends as he did before, he compares himself to others based on interaction on Facebook and feels very lonely. This is a major reason why the introverts spend alot of time browsing Facebook but only sparsely post themselves. They look at all the friends they wish they had instead of interacting and getting together with some of the friends that they already have. This is how I think Facebook, a tool meant to increase social interaction between friends, actually does quite the opposite. It keeps you on your computer longer, gives you a false sense of having many friends, and also makes you feel inferior to those who have more friends than you.