
The future of loneliness - Futurebot
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/future-of-loneliness-internet-isolation
======
cubano
In a world of selfies and shared profiles, how can someone whom has painful
memories of seeing themselves in photos ever since childhood supposed to join
the party?

How can someone who suffers from a pretty serious criminal record ever feel
comfortable meeting new potential partners who will almost surely run a
background check and discover unsavory things that really cannot be explained
away?

I ask these question because I live them every day.

Self-esteem and confidence about your looks is the elephant-in-the-room here.
I often feel Social is like welfare for the rich.

The people whom benefit the most are perhaps the same ones whom need it the
least.

~~~
obstinate
Is this much different than many other technological changes in history? Most
benefit a large group of people, while having negative consequences for the
smaller group.

I'm not sure what you mean about the photos thing, but there is obviously a
benefiting party from the digital background checks. People can get a sense of
folks they might date, and potentially avoid dangerous situations. It sucks
that that hurts you (assuming your criminal record is not one that people
ought to consider dangerous -- if it is, I'm really not sure what to say). But
there is a huge group of people that benefit from the increased safety
potentially offered by the ability to check up on potential dating partners.

Or, to put it succinctly, why does your interest in hiding your past outweigh
the interest of others to know who they are dealing with?

~~~
meric
Most benefit a large group of people, negative consequences for a smaller
group, and provide extreme benefits to a small tiny group.

In terms of Social - Look at youtube videos with millions of views, people
spending more time than ever reading about celebrities every ten minutes
instead of people around them. Before internet people look at celebrities once
a day during their TV sessions, and even before that, only listen about them
on radio.

And because people's attention is generally a zero-sum pie, without taking
into account population growth, people who weren't good at attracting
attention to begin with will lose out.

~~~
cafard
Do you shop at supermarkets? If the store isn't Whole Foods, chances are that
the checkout aisle is racked with People Magazine, US, and goes on down from
there.

------
nickbauman
"I used to think that the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It's
not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all
alone." — Robin Williams

------
KFW504
"Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they
long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming
intensely wary of exposure."

We are all walking the line of putting ourselves out there enough in a
meaningful, authentic way to feel an organic connection while also combating a
fear (that of course varies with the individual) of vulnerability.

The internet provides a little sugar high to create an artificial sweetness of
connectivity but fails to (on its own) provide the nutrients needed for a
healthy, complete life.

~~~
rambambam
Well spoken. Just perfect.

~~~
lindsey-lohan
I liked it too

------
tokenadult
I feel fundamentally different from this author about what the Internet is
doing to my interpersonal relationships, but she makes some good points. I
like Facebook very well because, duh, my friends are there. I have lived
overseas back in the era when I couldn't possibly afford regular international
telephone calls, and relying on aerograms (remember those?)[1] to communicate
by postal mail meant a rather slow response time to anything I said to old
friends back home.

After living overseas twice in my life (two separate three-year stays), I now
live in the same metropolitan community where I grew up, as the author didn't
when she had the experiences that shaped her opinion. ("My own peak use of
social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of
2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of
miles from my family and friends.") Some of the people I interact with online
have known me since almost fifty (!) years ago, a few of them continually over
all that while. Those friends who are still in this town I see in person once
in a while, but I hear a lot more of their news in between face-meeting
through online communication.

Because I've lived in more than one country, and some of my classmates and
colleagues and one child have scattered hither and yon, there isn't anywhere
on the planet where I can face-meet with all the people I like at the same
time, but my second stay overseas (1998-2001) illustrated the power of the
Internet to reduce feelings of loneliness and lack of connection while far
away from most familiar friends, and helped me learn how to use online
networks to enhance real-world friendships. These days, Facebook comes pretty
close to being with all my friends all the time, and I like that. I come here
on Hacker News, of course, pretty often, and here I can sometimes make a new
kind of friend over shared interests.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogram)

~~~
rayiner
I am torn. On one hand, social media has absolutely brought me closer to my
family. My family is scattered between Bangladesh, Australia, Canada, and
Germany, while my wife's is in Oregon and Washington. Nobody is close to where
we live in D.C. But they can all watch my daughter grow up on Facebook.

On the other hand, it's hard to have deep relationships over social media.
Tweeting and like-ing are pretty superficial. I feel like the internet has
regressed in a way. My late-night conversations over AIM were a lot more
meaningful than any interaction I've had over Facebook. Yeah, there's FB
Messenger, but it doesn't seem as pervasive or as convenient as AIM was back
in the day.

~~~
dman
For me part of what makes the interactions subpar now is that one or more
parties is participating via mobile devices and input on mobile is borked. I
am overly eager to be brief since typing on the mobile is so painful. This
makes it difficult to have nuanced conversations.

~~~
brational
I think you hit the nail on the head. My two best college friends and I are
all separated now but keep almost daily intellectual communication via gchat.
I have to use my phone tho as I work for R&D for a big corp and chat is
blocked.

It's aggravating. But then later when I can continue a conversation via
keyboard the depth and intimacy is much greater.

Maybe as speech to text improves it'll get better.

~~~
Malician
I've found that Google's speech to text works surprisingly well for me, and
I'm not the very best at clarity and enunciation.

I generally know what it's going to mess up in advance so I can just fix that.

Of course, this isn't very useful for an aurally communal work environment
like most offices.

------
cheatsheet
> My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate
> selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was
> perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of
> transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed.

Social groups, cultures, parents and children, friends. All of these concepts
rely on the concept of a connection between solid selves, that allow for the
passage of data/information from self to self. The resulting construction is
called a culture, a social group, a relationship. It only exists because there
exists other conceptual constructs that serve as comparative references.

> Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied
> but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s
> heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have
> control.

People's memories and imaginations, these are subject to play and replay, and
can result in both (il)logical and (ir)rational inference, independently or
socially established. These have been philosophical questions long before they
became digital.

------
borgia
I utterly loathe online social networks / social networking. They've become a
showcase for society's worst and little more.

Great for people who want to sell you something, or push a political ideology
on you, or whore attention for themselves but totally devoid of any actual
substance.

I've given them their fair shot. I keep a FB account to occasionally touch
base with friends back home and that's it. Twitter is a joke and I wish it the
worst. The rest aren't even worth mentioning.

------
toothbrush
So, slightly off-topic, but serious question: I don't use FB on principle
(tracking, walled garden, evil in various ways), but I also don't know how to
convince my "normal" friends to communicate in other ways... Does anyone have
suggestions to avoid falling out of contact with faraway people? I emigrate
every now and then, and I have yet to maintain connections after having left
another city. It's rather frustrating, but is something as evil as FB or Skype
or Google+ really the only way to approach this problem?

EDIT: I've re-activated my Diaspora account, but obviously no "normals" are to
be found there ;) Perhaps I should start campaigning.

~~~
Kiro
Honestly, if you don't have any better reasons not to use Facebook I think you
should just stick to it and keep a minimal profile. I'm pretty sure that as
soon as something becomes mainstream enough to be used by "normals" you will
classify it as evil and not use it out of principle.

~~~
toothbrush
I hear what you're saying, but my gripe is not at all it's "mainstreamness"
\-- it's that FB plays notoriously fast and loose with privacy as well as
copyright: I'm not quite prepared to sign off copyright to everything I post
(notably photography, for example). Plus, it's also got to do with a US-based
company knowing precisely what my social graph looks like that makes me uneasy
(although as I said Google mostly knows already, so ok).

> if you don't have any better reasons

Finally, I am curious: don't you think freedom is a reasonable reason? If
Diaspora were magically to become mainstream, I'm unlikely to classify it as
evil in the same way I would with FB. (i.e. you can transfer away your data,
spin up your own server, etc.)

EDIT: also, be the change you would like to see -- if I'm still on Facebook,
my friends would have _even less_ incentive to move away than currently, where
at least I can convince most people to email me.

~~~
Kiro
I'm with you on the copyright stuff. That's why I don't post anything on
Facebook - my photo albums and feed are completely empty.

What I'm saying is that you want a tool to keep in touch with your friends and
Facebook is that tool. If you don't use it for anything else I wouldn't say
freedom is an issue, no.

Anyway, you have some valid and fair points so I won't argue about the rest
(privacy, incentive to move away/email etc).

------
kijin
> _My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation
> . . . recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and
> friends. In many ways, the internet made me feel safe._

I can relate to this. My peak use of social media was while I was attending
university on the other side of the world.

But since a couple of years ago, almost everyone I care about is only a local
call away from me. Over the last couple of years, I have drastically reduced
my social media usage, and it wasn't because of the Snowden revelations. I
just don't feel the need to ping someone on <insert your favorite social
network here> when I can just call them up or, even better, meet them IRL.

Having lived for a decade in the second-largest country in the world, my sense
of distance also seems to have become a little weird compared to those of
others in my home country. Oh, Granny is only a five-hour drive away from me?
Why even bother talking on the phone then? I'll just drive there and see her
in person this weekend. The less electronics there is between us, the better.

Social media is a fallback option for when there aren't any low-tech
alternatives. But if you have healthy legs, there is no need to use a
wheelchair with NSA trackers attached to it.

------
ZenoArrow
"This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores.
In the past few years, two things have happened: a dramatic rise in online
hostility, and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered
by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion."

For the most part I enjoyed the article and found it thought-provoking, but I
didn't agree with this. A dramatic rise in online hostility? Speaking
personally, I haven't seen that.

In my experience, online hostility now is much like it has always been. I've
never found it to be in short supply. My Internet use from the start has been
closely linked to online discussion forums, and whilst some communities are
friendlier than others, I've never known a time that disagreement online was a
minor concern.

My favourite website is probably Reddit, which admittedly does house some of
the most negative aspects of the human experience, but also some of the most
positive aspects. For the most part, you get what you're looking for.

------
hydrafog
I can not remotely fathom the use of twitter or even facebook. I have accounts
with both even wrote a facebook app but posted maybe a dozen things total and
haven't touched either in years. It is utterly unimaginable to me to upload
photos of myself at random or post random statements. I haven't a clue how
this is keeping in touch.

Likewise the notion that one is in continuous contact with others is also
totally alien. I own a couple generations of iphones and androids, wrote some
apps for them but otherwise leave them in a drawer. They're there right now
batteries dead.

I do not know what percentage of people also think this way, twitter seems to
have low penetration but facebook enormous. One thing though is that such
people are not posting on the web and so would be under represented.

------
donatj
I've always had trouble making friends, I'm weird and kind of intense, while
at the same time painfully friendly.

Back in the internets earlier days it felt like I could find friendly people
everywhere. It became a safe haven for me, a place I could meet people who
shared my interests. I found one of my better friends to this day through an
online radio station.

Hell, even early Xbox live was friendly, I had lots of really good
conversations with people while playing Gotham Racing.

It really feels like now though I can't even get a conversation started online
anymore. Everyone with mics on black is in private parties, IRC rooms seem
increasingly unfriendly. The attitude has changed.

I feel increasingly isolated, I feel much like I did before the internet.

------
jokoon
I wish the internet would be a place where you could organize the co-renting
of large apartments to counteract this lonely society.

Also, facebook is not the place where you really can discover the people who
live around you, by advertising your skills, interests and potential deals you
could have with neighbors. One way to have enough privacy for this, would be
to limit the distance or amount of people you can see near you.

I don't really see that much success in social networking app when dealing
with localization...

------
PlotCitizen
I was reminded this video I saw some time ago with a similar title… It's in my
YouTube favorites and I'm pasting it here for your consideration:
[https://youtu.be/c6Bkr_udado](https://youtu.be/c6Bkr_udado)

You can also have a look at the TED talk the description references. Cheers.

------
pmalynin
"All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by
plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel ... Man puts the
longest distances behind him in the shortest time. He puts greatest distances
behind himself and thus puts everything before himself at the shortest
range...

What is happening here when, as a result of the abolition of great distances,
everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in which
everything is neither far nor near--is, as it were, without distance?

Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness [sic]. How? Is
not this merging of everything into the distancelesss [sic] more unearthly
that everything bursting apart?"

\--Excerpts from The Thing, Martin Heidegger circa 1971

------
gorachel007
Here's an interesting Forbes article about what happens when you unplug for a
while;
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/02/06/feeling-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/02/06/feeling-
disconnected-5-reasons-to-unplug-from-technology-after-work/)

It's more of an issue of technology making us interact in ways that are less
human. Check out their link on the study about cell users being less likely to
display prosocial behavior.

~~~
alexashka
Before there was facebook and twitter, there were televisions. It boils down
to entertainment and how readily available it is vs how readily available
spaces to safely interact with real people are.

If you live in a house, who are you going to go hang out with? Your 2
neighbours? Everybody else takes time to get to. Or you can sit down on the
couch and just watch some TV and be entertained without going anywhere.
There's never any conflict with a television - hence it is so appealing. You
have no real ups, but no real downs. People are largely very risk averse
(would much rather not get 2 dollars than lose a dollar)

The solution to people interacting with each other again, is TV/Internet
blackouts after 6pm at least half of the week.

When the city I lived in had an electric blackout for 3 days - people came out
of their homes and actually talked to one another, it was great. Then
everybody went right back to their televisions...

There's no money to be made from people learning to get along with one another
and simply talking, playing cards, going for walks... So, not going to happen
:) More make-up, clothes, tv-shows and making sure people medicate themselves
with overpriced drugs. If people learned to get along via come outside and
talk method, the current economy would undergo severe restructuring.

------
syoc
I enjoyed this article until they started focusing on "selfies" and social
media. Loneliness and human interaction over the internet is a very
interesting subject but I feel like the author has only used facebook and
instagram. There is no reason to limit this topic to communication platforms
built upon exposing your own personal life and connection that with you
communication. I think that communication over IRC, blogs, reddit, comments
like this and chans are more "pure" in a way and more interesting.

------
switch007


