Like you, I’m on the older side.
But one thing worth noting is that it isn’t the world that’s getting worse, it’s us.
I’m pretty certain that men have pontificating on the decline of the world (and kids these days) since we evolved the ability to talk.
Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.
Interesting that Sarah sees this as a perk of Facebook. This is actually one of the things that has started to irritate me about it. We all have real friends, and then we have acquaintances - people who form part of our daily lives and who we get along with, but who we aren’t especially close to. Pre-social networking (at least up to the late 90s when I graduated high school), if you moved or changed schools or jobs or phone numbers, it took work to keep up a relationship. For friends, you made the effort. Things like email reduced the effort, but there was still an element of intention there. You had to intentionally add someone to the “To:” field. For acquaintances, you didn’t make the effort, you lost touch and the relationship died a natural death.
Facebook makes it easy to keep those acquaintance relationships alive. Now I’m constantly being informed of my acquaintances birthdays, marriages, divorces, job changes, and other life events. Even if I don’t comment or “Like” them, I still expend energy reading them and thinking about them. No matter how easy Facebook makes it, it’s still time spent on people that I don’t really care that much about. Which leaves me less time and mental energy to spend on the relationships I do care about. At least once a day I read a post from a former classmate and think “I feel nothing about this person’s engagement. If this was 1985, we would never have bothered keeping in touch. That would probably have been better”.
BUT of course I’m still on it, because I want those sweet, sweet party invites.
I’m struck by her point about emotional labor, and am wondering if our inability to do that emotional labor the earlier generations did is in part also tied to the fact that we are overworked (generally speaking as a culture). So the shifting of emotional labor to platforms like Facebook is part of our larger lack of time for anything other than work for corporations?
Does that make sense?
Maybe it’s like the physical labor saving devices of previous generations - once you start using it, you can’t imagine going back to spending all that time and effort!
And if so, does that mean that we’ll have the hipsters of Generation Z buying nostalgia laden address books and sending greeting cards?
True. But I don’t think that they just crop up out of the blue, in the consumer economic system. They are both labor saving and profit generating, yeah? I think it makes them more attractive, because of it’s labor saving value for us, but who is reaping the real economic benefit? FB and other social media platforms, of course.
Let’s hope so! I’ve got great hope for Gen Z, actually! 
I know this solution wouldn’t work for most people, but I’ve found that moving to a small Swiss village, going to church, and joining the volunteer firefighters pretty much does what Facebook did.
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