I personally think that people shrug that question off...because it makes them feel bad that perhaps they really don't care enough to keep up with friends or family otherwise. Or perhaps they like being busy with their hobbies or jobs more than they actually like their family or friends. E-spying on a person via a tailored newsfeed is also hardly a relationship, regardless.
A new study now is also saying that social-networks, like Facebook, reinforced a tendency to overestimate people's happiness, underestimate other's negative emotions, or not being able to correctly perceive a friend's emotional state. This let to individuals brooding over their own woes or poor comparisons to other's 'better' lives.
Facebook is "like being in a play. You make a character," one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together. Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety," and suggests that the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. (The book's broader theory is that technology, despite its promises of social connectivity, actually makes us lonelier by preventing true intimacy.)
Read the whole article at Slate.com:
http://www.slate.com/id/2282620/
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