Is Facebook Making You Lonely?

With so many social media platforms available to communicate with friends and family, it's easy to think loneliness is something only the elderly feel.

But a new survey by Relationships Australia reveals the more you use technology to communicate, the lonelier you're likely to be.

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"Forty two per cent of Australians who used an average of four methods of technology to communicate [such as email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter] were lonely compared with 11 per cent of people who used only one," said Sue Miller, a manager at Relationships Australia.

The survey also challenged the notion that the elderly are more likely to be lonely, with just 11% of those over 70 claiming they were versus the 18-24 age group (19%) and the 25-34 age group (27%).

Worryingly, the US authors of a study published last year in PLoS Medicine say the negative effect of loneliness on people's wellbeing "is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic" and that it "exceeds the effects of no exercise or obesity".

"The quality of online communication is impoverished in comparison with the physical, real world face-to-face communication," Dr Catriona Morrison from the University of Leeds in England told the ABC.

"You often don't hear someone's voice and you don't see any body signals, which we know from traditional psychology are important."

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As to whether loneliness drives people to the internet or whether the internet and social media "lends itself to behaviours" that lead to loneliness, Morrison says that, it's "probably a bit of both".

"What we don't know is which came first: was it that they felt lonely and they used technology as a means to lessen their loneliness; or are they using more social media and that is increasing their loneliness?" adds Miller. "We now want to look at that question in more detail."