Connecting people.

Several of our group members (-dubbed ‘Tappers’ recently) alluded to loneliness being about a lack of valued connection with others. I began these posts on Loneliness Awareness Week by mentioning our tag line, ‘connecting people, encouraging community’ as the reason I felt it was important for us to mark it.  One of the questions I asked them was whether the internet was a help or contributed to loneliness.  Here are their responses, warts and all!

Contributes to loneliness.

• Seeing people online on Zoom or whatever isn’t the same as actually being with people.
• the more you do online, the more you can end up missing out on chances to meet other people at the shops or wherever.
• you can spend too much time on the internet and not enough with family and friends.
• I’ve been on the receiving end of some very negative emails.  It’s so immediate;the temptation is to react right away and make matters worse.
• You can get the impression from social media (Facebook etc) that others are doing amazing things and you’re not. It can feed into that sense of disconnection and loneliness.
• People may have a thousand ‘friends’ on Facebook but no real friends. They are actually on their own in their room, staring at a screen.

Connects people, helps.

It was a relief to me that the positives outweighed the negatives as far as the Tappers were concerned, though one did comment that that’s only to be expected given that they are regulars in our groups!

• I’d have been lost without my tablet. Emailing people, talking to my son on Messenger, Zoom chats, music, church services online …
• If I hadn’t had my iPad, I would’ve gone around the bend. Looking things up;reading;chats…
• …. others mentioned games, Netflix, getting recipes, watching Youtube videos.
• Imagine if this (..Pandemic) had happened 10 years ago. All we’d have had would be long distance calls, racking up the phone bill.
• The little (Tap into IT) group we have on a Tuesday is helpful. We seem to be able to keep it going and have a laugh too.
• Regular Zooms have been a godsend to me.
• When we were forced to isolate, the online chats were a great help to keep connected with people and even improve on connections.
• (Zoom etc) is quite close the real thing, face to face.
• There’s so much information on the internet – it’s amazing how much time you can spend on it.
• You can write to several people all at once in an email.
• You can connect with people all around the world if you want to.