Emily Articulated

@Connection

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

I’m always looking for the unseen things — the meaning between the lines, the unwritten rules, the subtle forces nudging us to act, think or feel a certain way. For this, I don’t look toward the divine, but toward the entity we become when we are together: our collective self, the zeitgeist, “society.”

This captivation with how we create order and meaning began in my first freshman-level sociology class and has shaped my worldview ever since. It peeled back my understanding of reality (a flimsy lens forged in a rural Midwest upbringing) and revealed the pre-determined quality with which people move through systems designed to guide how we arrive, think and behave.

These systems have been on my mind lately as they relate to social media, where meaning is evolving in real time, and behavior is becoming codified in our relationships. Increasingly, I find myself on the outside of understanding, no longer part of the group writing the rules, but instead fumbling to interpret them.

Two recent examples brought this into focus. The first involved one of my best friends, someone I deeply cherish but don’t see as often as either of us would like. For a few months, our communication dwindled to scattered texts, biweekly Instagram DMs, and sporadic “likes” on each other’s stories and posts.

When we finally talked, she shared that she’d felt hurt by the distance, despite what I had perceived as regular (albeit surface) contact. She also admitted — somewhat embarrassed — that my inconsistent “liking” of her posts made her feel insecure in our friendship. My social media behavior created a real-life rift.

If we haven’t seen someone in a while, we used to call, text or make plans. Now we check their stories, scroll their profiles, and maybe send a dog video or meme. Interactions that, for one person, might signal care, while the other barely registers them at all.

The second example comes from a person close to me reentering the dating world after a long, post-divorce hiatus. Our group text has become a running analysis of digital behavior: What does it mean if a man doesn’t reply to an audio message but is one of the first to watch her Instagram stories? We’re left trying to construct rules from inconsistent signals (an exercise that, I’ve decided, is mostly a waste of time).

This is intimacy, friendship and courtship in the age of social media: closeness versus its junk-food alternative. The original promise was connection, yet we’re often left with a proxy — something that feels like interaction without delivering its substance. The question lingers: Are the ever-expanding ways we can keep in touch actually preventing us from truly connecting?

Contemporary sociologists might argue that the same frameworks used to understand labor apply to social media. Originally, Karl Marx described alienation as a condition in which workers become detached from their work, their products and each other — reduced to cogs in a machine rather than fully expressed humans.

A factory worker assembling one small part of a car is distanced from the full process, the finished product and the pride of building something in totality. They are also separated from their peers, forced into competition rather than connection.

Similarly, social media can alienate us from our social lives. The interactions we have online are fragments of relationships. They’re partial, performative and easily misread. At the same time, we’re positioned against one another, competing for attention, validation and visibility, while platform owners profit from our continued lack of connection (driving us further and further online).

Symbolic interactionism offers another lens through which to consider social media’s effect. It focuses on how we create meaning through interaction — how a meme, a “like” or a story view comes to signify care, interest or indifference. What does it mean to share a meme with a friend? What does it mean to watch a story or “like” a post, and what does it mean when someone doesn’t?

We construct our identities and evaluate our relationships through how we believe others perceive us, increasingly mediated and quantified by likes, comments and views. But these signals aren’t fixed. They mean different things to different people, creating space for misinterpretation, unintended conflict and quiet breakdowns in connection — like the friend who feels unseen despite my “engagement,” or the date whose attention shows up everywhere but the inbox.

When social media becomes a primary mode of connection, it often fails to deliver the emotional depth of real interaction, paradoxically undermining the relationships it promises to sustain.

So where does that leave us? What does it mean to be “present” in someone’s life? What counts as care? What actually builds closeness? All we can do is use these tools cautiously: talking to people, writing our own rules within relationships and making the unseen things seen whenever possible. And, most important of all, definitely not dating the guy who doesn’t respond to texts.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.