There areinner directed persons and other directed persons. It's a fundamental difference in approach to one's life. Inner directed people need much less social interaction; other directed people need much more. What one does with one's social interaction, or its absence, is another matter.

There's nothing new in this. Social media and other technical wizardry has merely changed how the need is expressed but status has always been a major driving force in human interaction. Jane Austen's novels are full of just such manoeuvrings!

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and people are social animals. To ask if we are too social is like asking if fish swim too much or birds fly too much. The problem isn't whether we are too social or whether social acceptance is stressed too much, but how has civilization distorted our natural inclination to be social. Today there are routine protests of magazines retouching photographs to make already stick thin models look even thinner and toy manufactures selling things like Barbie dolls that are so disproportionate they would have to be seven foot tall just to survive. Its similar to the now largely abandoned Chinese tradition of binding women's feet because treating one another as abstractions is the cause of a great deal of confusion. Lao Tzu said, "Habits are the end of honesty and compassion, the beginning of total confusion!"

Well, thanks for your answers. I suppose it is only normal for humans to be social.

But the question was not whether being social has become too important but whether social acceptance has. There is environmental pressure on individuals to be "socially acceptable", but this can mean many different things, from learning the language to adapting to oppressive habits (e.g. racist, nationalist, ideological) dictated by power in a conformist society.

I heartily agree with the OP. We can be social, without being obsessed with fitting in. Check out:

https://angryautie.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/the-institute-for-the-study-of-the-neurologically-typical/

;)

When money does all the driving, nobody is steering and the guy with the gun in the backseat decides what is socially acceptable. The more wealth inequality we have, the more obsessed people become with their being socially acceptable. For example, the closer to a major urban center you get, the higher women's heals become because raising a family in a city where you can't go deer hunting and grow a little garden is not an option.