We must define relation as the intersection of two subjective experiences. Any communication technology is necessarily alienating, because it can only—at best—bring a proxy of someone else into my experience. But as long as there is a mediating layer between our two experiences, we can't be said to be interacting with each other. Only with representations of each other.
This fundamentally alienating quality of all communication media remains unaltered in the present age. The exponential growth of social media might have the appearance of bringing people into relation to each other, and certainly exposes the individual to far more numerous proxies of others than before, but they remain proxies. So the more people seem to be connected, the more alienated they are in fact, as more of their postures of relation are concerned with representations and proxies, rather than subjective beings.