Digital Socialization and Social Isolation
I used to think social anxiety was a private wiring, something that lived inside a person and only occasionally flared in crowded rooms. Then I began to watch people I know—friends, younger cousins, former students—change shape under the pressure of life lived online. Their stories are not clinical case notes but small, living proofs of how connectivity can manufacture isolation. Miriam: The Curated Self Miriam built a life in public. Her feed was meticulous: staged mornings, witty captions, carefully edited triumphs. Off‑camera she was frayed. I remember sitting across from her at a café as she scrolled through her own hour‑old post and counted likes with the intensity of someone auditing their pulse. She described conversations that never happened because she had rehearsed them for an audience instead of a single listener. Her anxiety came from the mismatch between an exhausting, performative visibility and the quiet absence of true intimacy. She was visible to thousands and al...