The Price of Modern Life Is Depression and Loneliness?

He quotes 2 scientific research papers as claiming ‘spending large amounts of time online for social purposes may increase social distress and have negative impact on self-esteem.’ or similar stuff.

But look at the details, the first article is about correlation, not causation. http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655

Stopped reading after that.

It's ridiculous how this statement gets so popular online.

This "Look Up" video has 46M views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY. Whatever post on this subject gets viral https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488

"The modern technology (read 'facebook') keeps us from interacting face to face, so it makes us lonely and depressed. It was so much better back in my day when we were playing ball, we were bumping into each other on the streets, and we were definitely much happier." - Such a load of crap.

These lonely people liking and sharing such nonsense are obviously online, and they are probably keeping in touch only with their school mates, or work colleagues at most. Imagine how lonely they must have felt if they could only interact offline, with just a small fraction of their current facebook friends, based solely on geography. Because that was the main criteria for human connection before the internet.

When instead we should get in touch with the people sharing our interests, regardless of where they are located on the map. That is one thing we can only do online, and this kind of human connections would give a sense of meaning in our lives.