"When I started to notice myself getting mean online I thought, 'Something is missing here. Something has gone terribly wrong," I think the larger problem is t

"When I started to notice myself getting mean online I thought, 'Something is missing here. Something has gone terribly wrong," I think the larger problem is that technology is not merely the addition of something new, but it's the addition of something new at the expense of something else, because technology abstracts. It's only a win if you don't care about the "something else" that you lose in the abstraction. With the Internet, we can communicate with more people and more quickly than ever before. That's a gain. We lose the body language, human touch, voice intonations, etc. More than merely making the communication more difficult, experiences like seeing someone smile at what you just said (rather that merely getting an upvote) and getting actual physical contact like a handshake or a hug are part of our necessary social nutrition. The Internet is making us more productive but if we aren't careful we can become socially malnourished.