[whitehouse3]

I don’t see how social media changes this. Life is filled with people who don’t reach out first. It’s not like instagram changes them. The number of direct, meaningful messages between you and them is probably the same, independent of the platform.

Social media facilitates indirect interaction (seeing posts from one another) but it won’t make “Han shoot first” more often.

Stated another way: if you long for others to make first contact with you, social media won’t scratch that itch.

[emteycz]

Right, but before social media other people made direct contact (phone, ICQ, Skype...) just as much as I did - now they feel it's enough to post on social media, and if you don't participate in that then you must make the contact.

My grandmother gets 2-5 random calls from her friends daily, the last unexpected call I received from a friend was in 2013 as we all switched to social media posting/commenting then.

[whitehouse3]

This is a fair point.

Somewhat disagreeing with my previous comment: but I’ve definitely seen this effect between iMessage / Whatsapp vs SMS. I’m more likely to interact with people one-on-one through those platforms instead of SMS because of the link/image/gif handling. My android friends without whatsapp/telegram/signal don’t hear from me as much because of that added friction.