Connected loneliness
We have never been so connected. We have never missed one another so much.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. His conclusion: loneliness represents a health risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. And it affects countries where digital connection is almost universal.
Social media sustain the type of tie that Mark Granovetter calls "weak" - connections that are superficial, practical, but not very nourishing emotionally. They also produce substitution effects: time spent interacting online sometimes replaces time spent in face-to-face interactions.
"Permanent connection is not presence. It is its imitation."
In the same spirit: Parasocial relationships · Reclaiming Silence
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Cyberbullying
Digital violence can pursue us without truce or rest into the smallest corners.
Before the internet, the schoolyard had its hours. At 5 p.m., one went home. That refuge no longer exists for adolescents subjected to digital harassment.
ANSES (2025) confirms what health professionals observe: cyberviolence intensifies psychological distress and can lead to serious consequences. Unlike traditional bullying, which stopped at the threshold of the school, digital violence pursues the pupil "into the intimacy of the bedroom, without truce or refuge".
"Harassment has found, with the digital world, a way to enter our lives everywhere and all the time."
In the same spirit: Digital disinhibition · Rediscovering Empathy
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Parasocial relationships
We cry at the death of an influencer we have never met. It is not madness. It is psychology.
In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl described the phenomenon: television viewers were developing towards celebrities a form of one-sided emotional relationship. With social media, that phenomenon has become an ordinary form of social bond.
These relationships are not pathological in themselves. The problem begins when they replace real relationships, or when they are exploited commercially.
"The influencer does not know you. But they know very precisely how to make you feel that they do."
In the same spirit: The Eliza Effect · Connected loneliness
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Erosion of empathy
Empathy is not a feeling. It is a competence. And it can be lost.
In 2010, a meta-analysis from the University of Michigan concluded that self-reported empathy levels among American college students had declined by 40% between 1979 and 2009. The sharpest drop came after the year 2000.
Empathy develops in physical relation: the gaze, the tone of voice, the posture. Digital interactions impoverish that register. But empathy can be taught. Education in digital empathy is not a pious wish. It is a concrete and major educational stake.
"Empathy does not ask for much. It asks that we know that the other feels."
In the same spirit: Cyberbullying · Rediscovering Empathy
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To situate the approach: A Digital Ethic.