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I believe that social media is a symptom, not the cause, of the great loneliness that our modern aloneness has caused. We are alone much of the time, especially

I believe that social media is a symptom, not the cause, of the great loneliness that our modern aloneness has caused. We are alone much of the time, especially in American suburbia. Even when we are in the city filled with people, these people are just blank faces whom we do not know. We are seeking any form of connection that we can get. And when the only connection to others that we have is through the computer, we become addicted to it. That said, I believe that once addicted to social media, the bubble of safety that we feel from "eating social junk food". The screen bubble, can become alluring and some people fall into it. I remember at the Prague hackerspace, how we'd all be sitting around the table, and I'd be confused, why people were laughing and interacting without words. It was a while till I realized that they were chatting on IRC.

raverbashing 9y ago
"Social junk food" is a good description Though I think the hacker space example is not bad, the technology helped people come together, and brought them closer (at least initially)
olivermarks 9y ago
http://nautil.us/blog/-why-facebook-is-the-junk-food-of-socializing http://nautil.us/blog/-why-facebook-is-the-junk-food-of-soci...
hux_ 9y ago
The cause is 30-40 years of a mindless consumption culture. It has given us growth but at a price. The good news is we it seems to be hitting it limits. And that's when things change. For the better.
- timthelion 9y ago
  While I hate consumerism, I wonder why you say that it has caused our loneliness. Wouldn't it be possible to buy large numbers of board games, and other social goods while not becoming isolated? It actually seems to me that consumption is for the most part social. I mean, if I spend all day at home on reddit, what do I need to buy besides cereal and soylent powder? But if I'm going out all the time, I'll buy clothing to keep up with the local fashions, I'll buy wine to bring as a gift, ect. Even the constant home improvement, that basement cinema and the pool room, are initially understood as social purchases. "We need this patio so we can have parties." "I'm gona invite all my friends over and we'll play X-Box."
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    Consumerism requires very high prioritisation of one’s career (as otherwise you won’t be able to afford all the nice stuff), which means working very hard, moving around the country/world for better jobs etc. This must come at the cost of friendships and family bonds.
    - timthelion 9y ago
      I believe that it is actually unhappiness and loneliness which are the drivers of consumerism and not the other way around. I believe that happy people are lazy and I think that is why western civilization has outstripped the others. I think, that since our social bonds have been destroyed, we work hard to try to seek happiness that the other civilizations already have. And then our civilization spreads, like a disease, infecting other civilizations and making them unhappy and hardworking as well. I think that this is a relatively new phenomena, which occurred during the urbanization caused by the industrial revolution. Urbanization caused social bonds to be broken, and people became unhappy and hard working. There is a super creepy tshirt from one startup I know, which has the text "the pyramids were not built by happy people". I've always wanted to ask them about what this means. But I've never had the nerve. But it has always haunted me.
      - paganel 9y ago
        > I believe that happy people are lazy I’m now reading Marx’s “Grundrisse” and at some point, while he has just started explaining the essence of capital, he mentions the story of an English priest who on visiting the island of Jamaica complains that everyone in there is lazy, that they don’t want to work more in order to achieve more in life than just obtaining their daily food, and that was the way to disaster. When asked by said English priest on why they were working just enough to put some food on the table the Jamaicans answered him that there’s no reason for them to work more than strictly necessary, they’re happy with what they have. Marx’s book was written in the 1850s so that I reckon that the English priest’s story dates from the early to the mid-1800s, i.e. when the Industrial Revolution was on full throttle in Britain.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  No that's not it. The _real_ cause for this angst is so many people disparaging the mindless consumption culture. (Perhaps teenagers are afraid there won't be opportunity to participate :).
codingdave 9y ago
Teenagers have always felt a need to connect with others. Social media allows you to think you are fulfilling it without actually engaging with other people. When I was that age, I had to get up and go out. And I spent time with lots of other teenagers, which also taught me to figure out who I liked and didn't, what I liked to do, and what I did not. FWIW, when my grandpa was that age, living on a farm, he'd hitchhike across Nebraska to meet other teenagers. Every generation has its own version of what they did to meet other kids their age. That is my real concern - nobody lives a perfect life or is perfectly happy as a teenager. But you take action to find a better life, and grow in those years, on multiple levels, and come out of it having developed into the person you will really be. So who will these kids be who spent those formative years staring at devices? I really don't know... is it just a new flavor of the same growth, or will it be different?
- Karunamon 9y ago
  What definition of “engaging” are you using that disclaims entire classes of communications technology?
johndoe489 9y ago
> and I'd be confused, why people were laughing and interacting without words. It was a while till I realized that they were chatting on IRC. Call me oldschool.. I'm just 43 and I still have that split second confusion every time I see someone speak aloud in the metro or tram here with their glassy stare, looking in front of them, while speaking to apparently no one. Every god damn time I'm like "(0.3 seconds) OH..." But am I not wrong. I don't need to "understand" anything. My body is that through which I know myself and everything else. All of what we call "reality" is experienced through, and as, a body. If anything technology should honor, and augment that instead of dissociating us.
- timthelion 9y ago
  That's a bit of a culture shock for me. Because talking on a cell phone is taboo in the Prague mass transport system. People will occasionally have a short and apologetically whispered phone call, but if you talk out loud old people will stare at you angrily and may even psht.
  - dazc 9y ago
    Sounds ideal to me. In the UK we have 'silent carriages' on trains but after a while the 'loud and impolite' people started to realise there was little or no enforcement so, although we still have them, they are pretty much redundant. In Spain (where I'm living now) there seems to be a class divide (much more in the UK) regarding etiquette for loud talking and phone conversations. Local busses and trains can be sheer hell yet longer distance services and flights tend to be quite civilised.
hliyan 9y ago
I too agree, but I believe the root cause is the scale, speed, complexity and volatility of modern life: there is a great deal of information overload and rapid changes which overwhelm a lot of us. Humans evolved in environments that usually involved absorbing a limited amount of fairly stable information, and dealing with communities of limited size (say, less than 100?), also fairly stable. Now we have to process thousands of faces (some in person, some through media), millions of pieces of information (news, commercials, trivia, education, business emails, social media feeds) and thousands of different micro-skills (learn the latest feature in smartphones, adapt to your bank changing its electronic banking policies, based on latest research now you need to learn to look for a low-carcinogen version of your favorite food, etc.) I wonder whether this is what's causing many people to zone out, some to retreat into private shells and a few to resort to senseless armed violence...

raverbashing 9y ago

"Social junk food" is a good description Though I think the hacker space example is not bad, the technology helped people come together, and brought them closer (at least initially)

olivermarks 9y ago

http://nautil.us/blog/-why-facebook-is-the-junk-food-of-socializing http://nautil.us/blog/-why-facebook-is-the-junk-food-of-soci...

hux_ 9y ago

The cause is 30-40 years of a mindless consumption culture. It has given us growth but at a price. The good news is we it seems to be hitting it limits. And that's when things change. For the better.

timthelion 9y ago
While I hate consumerism, I wonder why you say that it has caused our loneliness. Wouldn't it be possible to buy large numbers of board games, and other social goods while not becoming isolated? It actually seems to me that consumption is for the most part social. I mean, if I spend all day at home on reddit, what do I need to buy besides cereal and soylent powder? But if I'm going out all the time, I'll buy clothing to keep up with the local fashions, I'll buy wine to bring as a gift, ect. Even the constant home improvement, that basement cinema and the pool room, are initially understood as social purchases. "We need this patio so we can have parties." "I'm gona invite all my friends over and we'll play X-Box."
- taway_1212 9y ago
  Consumerism requires very high prioritisation of one’s career (as otherwise you won’t be able to afford all the nice stuff), which means working very hard, moving around the country/world for better jobs etc. This must come at the cost of friendships and family bonds.
  - timthelion 9y ago
    I believe that it is actually unhappiness and loneliness which are the drivers of consumerism and not the other way around. I believe that happy people are lazy and I think that is why western civilization has outstripped the others. I think, that since our social bonds have been destroyed, we work hard to try to seek happiness that the other civilizations already have. And then our civilization spreads, like a disease, infecting other civilizations and making them unhappy and hardworking as well. I think that this is a relatively new phenomena, which occurred during the urbanization caused by the industrial revolution. Urbanization caused social bonds to be broken, and people became unhappy and hard working. There is a super creepy tshirt from one startup I know, which has the text "the pyramids were not built by happy people". I've always wanted to ask them about what this means. But I've never had the nerve. But it has always haunted me.
    - paganel 9y ago
      > I believe that happy people are lazy I’m now reading Marx’s “Grundrisse” and at some point, while he has just started explaining the essence of capital, he mentions the story of an English priest who on visiting the island of Jamaica complains that everyone in there is lazy, that they don’t want to work more in order to achieve more in life than just obtaining their daily food, and that was the way to disaster. When asked by said English priest on why they were working just enough to put some food on the table the Jamaicans answered him that there’s no reason for them to work more than strictly necessary, they’re happy with what they have. Marx’s book was written in the 1850s so that I reckon that the English priest’s story dates from the early to the mid-1800s, i.e. when the Industrial Revolution was on full throttle in Britain.
mythrwy 9y ago
No that's not it. The _real_ cause for this angst is so many people disparaging the mindless consumption culture. (Perhaps teenagers are afraid there won't be opportunity to participate :).

codingdave 9y ago

Teenagers have always felt a need to connect with others. Social media allows you to think you are fulfilling it without actually engaging with other people. When I was that age, I had to get up and go out. And I spent time with lots of other teenagers, which also taught me to figure out who I liked and didn't, what I liked to do, and what I did not. FWIW, when my grandpa was that age, living on a farm, he'd hitchhike across Nebraska to meet other teenagers. Every generation has its own version of what they did to meet other kids their age. That is my real concern - nobody lives a perfect life or is perfectly happy as a teenager. But you take action to find a better life, and grow in those years, on multiple levels, and come out of it having developed into the person you will really be. So who will these kids be who spent those formative years staring at devices? I really don't know... is it just a new flavor of the same growth, or will it be different?

Karunamon 9y ago
What definition of “engaging” are you using that disclaims entire classes of communications technology?

johndoe489 9y ago

> and I'd be confused, why people were laughing and interacting without words. It was a while till I realized that they were chatting on IRC. Call me oldschool.. I'm just 43 and I still have that split second confusion every time I see someone speak aloud in the metro or tram here with their glassy stare, looking in front of them, while speaking to apparently no one. Every god damn time I'm like "(0.3 seconds) OH..." But am I not wrong. I don't need to "understand" anything. My body is that through which I know myself and everything else. All of what we call "reality" is experienced through, and as, a body. If anything technology should honor, and augment that instead of dissociating us.

timthelion 9y ago
That's a bit of a culture shock for me. Because talking on a cell phone is taboo in the Prague mass transport system. People will occasionally have a short and apologetically whispered phone call, but if you talk out loud old people will stare at you angrily and may even psht.
- dazc 9y ago
  Sounds ideal to me. In the UK we have 'silent carriages' on trains but after a while the 'loud and impolite' people started to realise there was little or no enforcement so, although we still have them, they are pretty much redundant. In Spain (where I'm living now) there seems to be a class divide (much more in the UK) regarding etiquette for loud talking and phone conversations. Local busses and trains can be sheer hell yet longer distance services and flights tend to be quite civilised.

hliyan 9y ago

I too agree, but I believe the root cause is the scale, speed, complexity and volatility of modern life: there is a great deal of information overload and rapid changes which overwhelm a lot of us. Humans evolved in environments that usually involved absorbing a limited amount of fairly stable information, and dealing with communities of limited size (say, less than 100?), also fairly stable. Now we have to process thousands of faces (some in person, some through media), millions of pieces of information (news, commercials, trivia, education, business emails, social media feeds) and thousands of different micro-skills (learn the latest feature in smartphones, adapt to your bank changing its electronic banking policies, based on latest research now you need to learn to look for a low-carcinogen version of your favorite food, etc.) I wonder whether this is what's causing many people to zone out, some to retreat into private shells and a few to resort to senseless armed violence...