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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest, Dangley Bits Edition.

It's Wednesday, April 25th, 2012. On today's program, is Facebook making us more lonely?

We discuss an article from the most recent Atlantic Monthly,

Rupal's Drag Race with Slate's own June Thomas, and finally Dick Clark has died, and so we discussed the legacy of America's oldest teenager with Slate's own Jody Rosen. Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hey, Julia. Hi, Julia. Hi, Steve. And of course, Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Steve.

Well, this month's Atlantic Monthly features a long and now much discussed article about loneliness in America and whether or not it's epidemic and whether or not Facebook is playing some kind of role in that epidemic.

It's by a novelist named Stephen Marsh.

Let me quote a little bit from the article to give its flavor, and then let's dig right in.

Marsh writes, over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment, yet within this world of instant and absolute

communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation.

We've never been more detached from

one another or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have

less and less actual society. We live this accelerating contradiction. The more connected we become,

the lonelier we are. Dana, how did that thesis strike you? Does it strike you as true or overstretched? What did you make of this article?

This article really got on my nerves.

And I'm glad that Slate ran a refutation of it, a very smart one I thought, by Eric Kleinenberg.

But before I even knew about that refutation or had read it, there was something about this article that just struck me as disingenuous to its core. And apparently some of the research in it, in fact, is research that's been put into question in the years since the studies were done. But I think what troubled me the most didn't have to do with the content of the studies, it was how little evidence the author was using to how little he was marshalling to kind of support his position. It just seemed like declineist argumentation taken to its extreme. And I felt like

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