Facebook instead of Face-to-Face

I’m constantly hearing from adults that I need to get off “The Facebook” and go be social.  Ross Douthat, a writer for the New York Times, has now joined my parents in arguing against social interaction through the internet in his article The Age of Individualism.

Typically someone raised in a home without a ton of exposure to the internet or other groups of people would adopt their parents’ religion or political party. But with internet access, your brain becomes a mixing pot of ideas.

People around my age don’t generally go to church to hang out with friends on sundays. They’re more likely to be sitting at home and writing American Studies blogs or binge-watching Netflix. They’re not getting their sense of community from a religious institution or even a or an actual meetup. Instead, they’re making their social connections through internet mediums like Facebook.

The consequence of this departure from face-to-face social interaction is that it is considerably more difficult to trust other people. According to the Pew Research Survey Millennials in Adulthood: detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends, only 19% of millennials responded that generally speaking, most people can be trusted. It’s a lot easier to trust a tightly-knit group of people who you meet with regularly than it is to trust that girl you went to summer camp with in 6th grade who you occasionally chat with on Facebook.

This mistrust is bred by the lack of physical community. It’s a lot harder to lie face-to-face that it is to lie on on the internet because you don’t have to worry about body language or tone of voice. Knowing this, why would you immediately place your trust in every one of your 436 Facebook friends, 370 which are total strangers?

Would it be better for young people to shut their laptops and join a youth-group, or should things stay as they are? Is there a realistic happy medium?