Ms. Flora did note the advantages of digital media for introverts and people susceptible to loneliness, namely that it is less risky and enervating to make contact through a text or post than through a phone call or an invitation to meet.

When I was in high school I bought my first cell phone, and it came with a truly amazing feature: Text messaging. I remember how amazing it was to be able to communicate with anyone without actually talking to them!

Things got even better when I got access to the world wide web on my spare time. I found a chat room with some friendly people, bound together by a common interest in video games and pop culture, which I still hang out in every day, almost a decade later. Without that room and those dozen+ people I count among my friends, spread across time zones, I might have been a very lonely person.

These findings jibe with the research of Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford. He has theorized that “group size” of both humans and nonhuman primates — the number of people (or, say, chimpanzees) one can maintain social cohesion with — correlates to “relative neocortical volume,” or the ratio of the neocortex to the rest of the brain.

The first time I learned about this was reading an article on, of all places, Cracked. I'm not allowed to share links yet, so if you have the time, visit Cracked and search for "monkeysphere". It's seriously one of the most eye-opening articles I've ever read.

I was gonna argue that it just depended on what friends you made, but this:

"Two statistics from the General Social Survey in 1985 and 2004 are often invoked regarding the influence of new technology on close friendships and social isolation. The average number of confidants people said they had dropped from 2.94 to 2.08 over that time, and the number of those who had none at all went from one-tenth to nearly one-quarter."

Is sort of inarguable. I have definitely noticed that some of my friends engage more with their phones than with me when we hang out, and have been guilty of it myself to a certain extent.

I wonder if this type of loneliness has led to the influx of "depression meme" posts on Reddit/Facebook. It's always seemed to me to be a way to make the entire internet your confidant.