Actual friends meet face to face – not on Facebook

here was a great cartoon once that encapsulated the conundrum of the social media age; a widow talking to her friend in a funeral parlour with no one else there but the two of them and the dead husband, as she proclaimed with some exasperation: “I only booked such a big place because he had over 500 friends on Facebook.”

Friends are still best defined by the old standards; someone you actually know and might occasionally go for a pint with – or at the very least someone you’d instantly recognise on the street.

A friend is not someone who clicked on your Facebook page requesting direct contact, but who otherwise is as foreign to you as a day spent living on Mars.

The internet is a wonderful thing that has revolutionised the world around us, and social media allows us to communicate instantly with anyone and everyone in a way that, even a generation ago, we never thought possible.

But it is equally not the panacea that some seen to think it is – and the escapism that it offers will at best offer a temporary high.

There was a notion that you could cheer yourself up by posting a funny picture of your cat, or coming up with some caustic comment on the world around you.

Because that put your wit and wisdom into the world’s shop window – and your friends (real and electronic) would collectively marvel at how lucky they were to sort of know you.

But – according to a study carried out by the British Psychological Society – it turns out that this doesn’t do anything for you at all.

In actual fact, you might well seem slightly pathetic, inadvertently conveying to friends and followers that you have a string of character flaws and suffer from low self-esteem.

This study asked 344 people who used social media how they felt about interacting with others online and cross- referenced the answers with questions about their personality and sense of self-worth. The participants’ average age was 27 but the study included people of all ages.

For more, see this week’s Connacht Tribune.