5 Topic Commentaries

Online Presence and Offline Connection

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  Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA

  Public health; internal medicine

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  Office of the U.S. Surgeon General

  The keys to human connection are simple, but extraordinarily powerful.

  Source
• 

  Sherry Turkle, PhD

  Social studies of science and technology; human–technology interaction

  •

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  “As we instant message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude,”

  Source
• 

  Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD

  Sociology; medicine; social networks

  •

  Harvard University

  “Based on this, we found that people typically had over 100 Facebook friends, but only six real friends [who uploaded and tagged their photo].”

  Source
• 

  Jamil Zaki, PhD

  Psychology; social neuroscience; empathy

  •

  Stanford University

  “We should think of this time as ‘physical distancing’ to emphasize that we can remain socially connected even while being apart.”

  Source
• 

  Carol Vidal, MD, PhD, MPH

  Child and adolescent psychiatry

  •

  Johns Hopkins Children’s Center

  “Learning to have a healthy relationship with social media is as important as learning to have healthy relationships with food or exercise,”

  Source