SHRINKING SOCIAL CIRCLES

From real to virtual friends, and now AI companions, has technology led to a deeper isolation that we have embedded in our lives?

- GARIMA SADHWANI

FOR A LOT of people growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, their coming of age happened on the Internet. There was Facebook where you added everyone you had ever known and there was an innocuous Instagram where people would share their unfiltered (or with extreme colour filters) everyday moments -a cup of coffee, a pretty flower on a sidewalk, or a funny selfie with their best friend. Those were simpler times... of course, not as simple as before smartphones were invented, but who even remembers that now? However, whoever hopped on to these platforms in their early phases can tell you that these were solid places to strengthen old or existing friendships; and to harbour new ones as well. Everyone you knew from school or college, you could talk to for hours on Facebook; and on Twitter (now X), you could connect with people over common interests-politics, law, cinema, and what not.

The Internet could have been a wonderful place to nurture these friendships and for many, it has been-but it's led to a deeper isolation we've now embedded in our lives, that of shrinking social circles.

Without notice, the world moved away from making friends through chance encounters, awkward interactions, or through being in the same communities to becoming friends with strangers through virtual mediums across geographies and topographies, simply because the online algorithm somehow connected you two.

Now, in the past few years, technology seems to have taken a step further. From real friends and virtual friends, we've now moved to imaginary friends, the elephant in the room-AI companions.