I disagree with Koy about internet activity. I do think that interacting with people online does help prevent loneliness. And, I don't think we all need face to face social engagement to feel like we are interacting with other people.
To clarify, I think it helps as well, just not long term and as one’s only means of interaction, unless one is in dire circumstances (i.e., stationed at the Antarctic or some non-choice-based circumstances). The medium—the technology itself—however, serves only to further isolate. It’s a lot like anti-depression medications that cause depression as a side effect the more you use them.
As to the “need” for face-to-face, that’s missing my point (and my fault as well for not better clarifying). What Homo sapiens sapiens “needs” is physical interaction (most likely the side effect of evolution and a need for tribe-based survival against animal attacks, including other Homo sapiens sapiens).*
The “technological” age, however has seen the invention of escalatorily (to coin an adverb) isolating mediums. We used to sit around a fire and tell stories of the day’s hunt or whatever. Reflective group interraction. This daily ritual served many purposes without anyone really knowing it and for the longest time it got augmented/extended by the invention of “theatre” (i.e., stage acting/performing) as well as “art” (i.e., painting), but that’s a tertiary branch.
The medium of theatre, in particular, shifted things, such that the stories we told were no longer about the immediate tribe, but the extended tribe (i.e., people from other tribes). For centuries this was a unifying medium in that it allowed tribes from all over the world to share various commonalities (as well as explore differences). As humanity/civilization grew, theatre was the medium that arguably spread that foundation the best (along with various other art forms) and it did so effectively precisely because everyone was present in the room. Body language and human interraction was inherent to the circumstances before, during and after every performance.
With the industrial/technological age, however, theatre—as a dominant medium for human interraction/reflection—slowly got replaced first with radio, which is a medium that is, I would say, one full step removed from the nightly fire ritual in the sense that the narrator of the night’s stories and the “characters”—like in theatre—are no longer the people around the fire and your fellow tribe’s men and women, but still one’s imagination was engaged to picture the events being described and project one’s own mental world.
Unlike theatre, the individual audience member was free to fill in the blanks, as it were and so the medium captured a whole generation quickly. It also, of course, allowed for more timely “news” to be delivered and a prioritizing of what was deemed important by the tribal “elders” so to speak. But arguably the most important feature to the medium was that you didn’t have to leave your home to engage with it. Isolation from the larger tribe in turn solidifies the immediate family as one’s primary tribe, so we were one step removed from fully engaged social interraction with the larger tribe, but still engaged interactively with one’s own family members (for the most part) in sitting around the fire listening to stories (only the fire was now a radio).
Then of course came movies, famously derided as a “fad,” (just like TV) which are several more steps removed and no longer engage one’s own private mental world like radio (or theatre), but in a whole new way that actually required a physical evolution of sorts to adjust to the medium itself. You research any early days of film showings and you get numerous anecdotes about people thinking a train was actually about to hit them and the like.
It’s the first instance of what McLuhan would later crystallize with his “the medium is the message” assessment of TV, where the delivery mechanism—the technology—takes over and the content it is delivering is secondary. People are still interacting with other humans in the room, but in a much more isolated way. You watch a movie and you’re fixated on the screen and get irritated when anyone speaks or even coughs (breaking your engagement).
Which of course brings us to TV, which is exponential steps away from the fire ritual even though in appearances it seems like merely a small extension. The technological age, however, is now taking a giant step in pysically restructuring our brains to mold us to “it” in the technological sense, rather than earlier mediums engaging or “capturing” our attention. TV just takes it. It is the first medium of its kind that induces passivity on its audience, which in turn isolates the audience member like no other medium before it.
When you “watch” TV (a misnomer) the technology essentially places you into an alpha/hypnotic state and simply beams content more or less directly into your brain, causing you to shut down most if not all critical cognitive functions. Your imagination is not engaged at all; quite the contrary. While you are “watching” you are really more like ingesting something that is being force-fed into you. I mentioned this book many times, but I strongly encourage anyone interested to read
The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television for further discussion on this point (hint: three of the arguments have nothing to do with content).
Point being, that TV isolates such that, even in a crowded room, each individual thinks he or she is the only one being “spoken” to. The only thing that makes it a group activity is if someone is offering a running commentary on what’s being watched (such as during a sports broadcast).
This is NOT the same condition as in a movie theater, btw, again due entirely to the mechanics of the medium itself. A film is (used to be) projected onto a screen and thus the audience is watching reflected light as opposed to TV, which is basically if you stood up in a movie theater, turned around and the projectionist focused the projector to beam the movie directly into your eyes.
Now, of course we leap another exponential level to computers and then another to laptops and then another to portable TV screens (iPhones) and we are so far removed from sitting around the fire and we get this now:
Fully engaged individuals that are engaged only in individual activity, ignoring and largely oblivious to the people that are literally right next to them. The tribe is almost completely gone and every individual is isolated, but
thinks they are fully socially engaged because of artificial “communities.” We even still call them “communities” (like here and Facebook and the like). They are “social” only in name.
Now, does this have any bearing on the statistical fact that within any group there will be a certain small percentage who just feel like they don’t belong (e.g., “introverts”
? Probably not, but then I was attempting, anyway, to separate the more dire or extreme from the general or majority.
*ETA: I also think we are evolving beyond that, but I’m not sure technology actually helps us evolve or merely takes the place of evolution, arresting us physically at our current state and then simply supplanting that function for us, eventually resulting in our seemingly inevitable uploading into mechanical forms, whatever they may be. Personally, I think we will all upload into little black boxes and “live” eternally in purely artificial realities, which is both the logical endgame of these exponentially isolating mediums and the logical endgame to our metaphysical/ epistemological “solipsistic” condition (i.e., our “user illusion”
.
[quote=""sohy""]It would also be interesting to know if engaging with people on the Internet can prevent loneliness. :d unno:[/quote]I think it can.