| Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect. Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing. When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example. Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that. Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point. As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to
1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it.
2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year. So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools. |
I would not wish lonliness on anyone, though I hope in your example, FB is used to facilitate better social interaction, rather than subsume it entirely.