Seems like there are plenty of social commentators these days who insist that thanks to the Internet and various other forms of instant communication we are actually more connected than ever.
Gone are the days when you sat down and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote a longhand letter to a friend across the world and then you put it in an envelope and affixed a stamp and tossed it in the mailbox.
A week - or maybe two weeks - would pass and they would finally receive your letter. Then they'd pull out their own sheet of paper and a pen and sit down and write a reply to you and the whole exchange of communication might have taken anywhere from two to four weeks, all told.
Having actually grown up in that era I have to admit that it had its positives. One of those positives was that you actually got to experience such emotions as anticipation. The other thing about it was that when you got an actual paper letter in your mailbox you had a concrete and tangible piece of evidence that there was a little piece of "something" there from your friend.
Without a doubt, the world has definitely become "smaller" in the sense that I can wake up this morning and decide to say something to my cousins in Denmark, and it's evening over in Denmark and they'll get my message over there during their after dinner coffee and send a response right back.
I'll be the first to admit that there's definitely is something cool about being able to do that. But to what extent is it really a good thing? In spite of the fact that we have the ability to bring the entire world into our living room at a moment's notice are we actually any more connected than we ever were?
There are ways in which I have my doubts that we are. I look around me and it's hard not to notice how people are virtually attached to their technology as if by an invisible chain, and it's also hard to not notice that people spend far more time looking at a little screen than actually looking at people across the table in physical setting.
I look back about 30 years and I remember one of the early things people were always worried about on the Internet was variations of "yeah, but people can hide who they truly are and you can discover you're not really talking to the person you thought you were!"
I suppose there is an element of truth to that, but on the other hand when you meet somebody down at your local pub you really don't have any idea - at least in the beginning -whether they actually happen to be the local pedophile.
When I talk to people at length about their feelings about "being connected" it seems like it's as often as not that we have all this connectivity, but we're not that connected.
Think about it: maybe we have 5,000 "friends" on Facebook but we're still eating TV dinners alone at home. Is that really an improvement over what we had before? Back in the age of snail mail?
And we call these online venues we frequent "social" media but how social is it really? How social is it really to rail on about some hobby horse of yours into the void of the Internet, while saying often hateful things to people you don't even know?
Sometimes I think it would behoove us to play a little more attention to our offline lives, and to the people in our neighborhood who are actually going to show up and pick up our mail and newspapers on the days when we're out of town. In many ways, that's where the real connectivity actually is.
I realize that maybe I sound a little bit old-fashioned and the way I'm coming across here. But, at the same time, I'm not a Luddite... I was one of the first quarter million people to have an email account when the Internet became a public thing back when. So I'm not exactly a stranger to this medium.
The interesting thing about "game changing" technologies is precisely the fact that they change the game. The thing we often overlook - whether deliberately or because we don't want to look directly at it - is that sometimes the game has changed and in ways that are not actually what we had intended.
Now we're starting to get onboard with the latest iteration of game changing in the form of artificial intelligence, and it'll be interesting to see where that all ends up taking us. Will it have any influence on how we connect? With the advent of AI at a sophisticated level make humans feel even more isolated than they currently are? Or would we simply redefine what it means to feel connected to someone or something else?
Of course, these are mostly speculative questions and I don't pretend that I have any answers to them; I'm simply posing the questions.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your weekend!
How about you? Do you think we are more connected than ever? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
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Created at 2023-08-13 01:09 PDT
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