But in terms of hypothesizing how these technologies will influence folks in the unfolding depression, I don't know what about our criticism does not seem reasonable. I don't know what about it would put off potential rewilders.
Well, if I read you right, you seem to say that since these things don’t have any rewilding content, that it won’t help promote rewilding at all. And furthermore, these things “cripple many aspects of sociability,” including the ability of the young to talk to the old. Do you mean by that, that young people used to have a great rapport with the older generation, before MySpace and Facebook ruined that? Many newspapers regularly reprint a letter about how “kids these days” have no morals, don’t know how to live right, and so on; you find the “zinger” only at the end, when you see that Aristotle wrote it in ancient Greece. Kids have had a hard time talking to the older generation ever since the Neolithic Mortality Crisis dropped life expectancy into the mid-twenties and the agricultural world became Lord of the Flies. I think in a lot of profound ways, we’ve spent the past 10,000 years dealing with that intense trauma. I fail to see where any website could really have any kind of impact on that, positive or negative.
Except insofar as relationships with the older generation have suffered as a subset of relationships as a whole. We feel increasingly isolated. They’ve studied this and seen that your modern American has fewer relationships with anyone, older or younger, than ever before. So this doesn’t involve a trade-off between real, flesh-and-blood relationships vs. shallow, online ones; it involves shallow online relationships vs. no relationships at all. And in fact, increasingly, social networking doesn’t involve shallow online relationships (like the ones, ironically enough, fostered by shared-interest web fora like this), but a supplement to real, flesh-and-blood ones. You follow people you know in real life on Twitter. You become friends on Facebook with people you hang out with. It becomes a way to keep in touch, like Giuli said; a way to keep constant tabs on each other, to read what each of you thinks and feels. Ever read a deeply personal LiveJournal entry and think, “What makes this person think total strangers would want to read something so personal?” You feel vaguely like a voyeur–because you’ve acted like one. They don’t use it like a newspaper to publish their inner-most thoughts to strangers; they use it as a conversation in a crowded public space, and just like leaning in too close on such a conversation, reading an entry like that feels like eavesdropping because it really involves the same violation. I agree with Giuli, it seems almost like tribal preschool in a lot of ways. Insofar as these things help people form relationships at all, they help us become better able to relate to the older generation, too. (Frankly, in my own experience, the difficulty in forming relationships with older people has generally come from their contempt and condescension.)
But how it would put-off potential rewilders … well, I think if you meet someone who knows what “rewilding” means and views it favorably, you might as well move on because that one’s OK already. We make up such a vanishingly small fringe of a fringe that it seems silly to expect rewilding to triumph from everyone consciously embracing it. But rewilding also points to the human default. When people form closer communities and stronger relationships, when they restore the social focus of their lives, they rewild. They may not call it that, but they do it, nonetheless. Therein lies my sole hope for rewilding’s success: that you don’t need to know how to do it, in order to do it. Most people will rewild entirely by accident.
But discussions like this seem incredibly self-righteous to me. This and that and that sully and contaminate; it seems to condescend to anyone who does or uses this or that or that, telling them they’ve “sinned” and become polluted, and need to become pure (“like me,” they inevitably hear, whether you say it or mean it or not). That describes how I read it, and I know others would, as well.
When I think of pacification of the "desperately lonely", I think of other more distracting and entertaining mediums like T.V., youtube, and games like World of Warcraft.
My employer gives me a budget to go to conferences and such, and I recently got back from one, where I attended a session on virtual worlds, particularly World of Warcraft, led by a woman who did a two-year ethnographic study of WoW players. She noted that WoW became for them what the pub became for Englishmen, or the men’s hut in so many tropical tribes: the “third place” safe for socialization. It became a way to foster relationships with people. And did it take away from family dinners, or school work? No, according to the data, the time kids spent playing WoW came out of the time they would otherwise have spent watching TV. So instead of watching TV, they formed spent time with people. I know I never touched WoW, personally, until one of my best friends moved out to California, and it became the main means by which we could continue our relationship. So I really think WoW belongs more with Facebook or MySpace than TV. I wouldn’t trade my time face-to-face with my friend for equal time in WoW, but given that or no contact at all, I really don’t see how my time in WoW indicates that I’ve undercut my flesh-and-blood relationships.
Where there used to be more emphasis on the isolated nuclear family and the ability to "show off" your way of life ( house, car, family.... whatever) there is now more emphasis on social groups of friends who are more adept at just "hanging out."
Agreed. Yes, we have much to take alarm from, but from time to rare time, things genuinely do get better!
I wouldn't expect this to lead to tribalism (except in our cases) , but I can see it as leading to a less socially isolated "depression" for most people. I just can't imagine that all these connected friends would let their friend networks dissapear just because the technology is gone.
Well, what do you mean by “tribes”? If they don’t give up that social interaction just because the technology dies, and they start to pull together, what else would you call that?
But sadly, I have known plenty of people who confuse their online friends with real friendship. I've known plenty of people who will ignore real socializing in person, going out with their friends and such, to chat online or something similar. It might not be the usual behavior, but I also don't think it's entirely uncommon.
I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone like that. I’ve seen them as outliers on studies, but I’ve never met them. The data says they occur very rarely, about as rarely as people who get addicted to anything else. And in our society, you can find plenty of reasons to seek out a good, solid addiction.
