This is what a "good economy" looks like. Parents who work long hours so they can afford to rent some great apartment and buy stuff for their family. They outsource a lot of the childcare to professional nannies or whoever. They outsource a lot of the elder care to nursing homes etc. People are getting married later in life so they can focus on their career. Individualism, kids moving out early, trying to impress each other with great apartments etc.
We are materially richer, but what about the social connections?
Similarly with technology. Take birthdays, for example. On their birthday people used to get personal phone calls, possibly emails. Then facebook made it easy to just write "happy birthday" on someone's wall, and see who else wrote it. Then, to increase "engagement" (or the appearance thereof), they let you write a quick note right where the birthday reminder appeared, on the right-hand pane. Now you couldn't even see what others wrote, and sometimes would breeze through, personalizing the greetings slightly "Happy birthday girl! Older and sexier they say."
Now, people are complaining that they have to get through so many birthday wishes on their wall and write a semi-personalized "thanks" response to each one. So the remaining step is to make an app to automate this. So the end result is we'll have nearly automatic sending and nearly automatic thanking, basically robots talking to robots, while the whole experience of birthday wishes is automated away from humans.
All of which is why I walked away from the whole charade that is Facebook. Frankly, fuck that noise. Facebook added nothing to my life. I have the same number of friends as I had when I was Facebook but now I know who they are.
> Now, people are complaining that they have to get through so many birthday wishes on their wall and write a semi-personalized "thanks" response to each one.
Noooooo you just made that up in your head.
> People are getting married later in life so they can focus on their career.
Noooo, they are just no longer ignorant and don't think a god will smite them if the have a relationship before marriage.
> kids moving out early, trying to impress each other with great apartments etc.
Noooo, they are more childish than ever and are now still living with the parents past their mid teens. Here the reality might actually make you point.
The world is what you believe it to be, you're far from reality but it will become that for you if you keep believing this stuff.
Well, online services are also actual interactions with other people, much of the time.
They are interactions based on telecommunications, computing, display and sound reproducing technologies, etc, and they are one way to have contact with other people. "Real-world" interactions are also involve mediums: sound waves traveling in air, eyesight dependent on presence of visible light frequencies. Physical phenomenons like the transport of bits is, deep down.
Yes, there are some aspects in physical presence which do not apply to on-line social connections. Most importantly, touch.
But (depending on culture), we don't often touch people who are in the same room, either. On-line interactions have also some aspects that improve our workings with other people, over physical presence -- for instance, from on-line you can go off-line and exchange ideas and information, while if you're in a room and speak, the person who comes in 5 minutes later will not hear it.
I am sorry to say but you're so wrong... human interaction is not only accoustic and touch-based, but also visual, which takes most of sensory signal feed to brain (correct me if I am wrong here).
If you shun away from human interaction, that's fine. But be honest to yourself and don't say few clicks/strokes of keyboard are similar to having a decent talk with anybody. Heck, even video conf call is miles away from real world experience. I am an introvert myself, but this is simply not true.
Interaction in the same room is not the same as on-line interaction, of course; but it is not better in all ways. Many ways, yes, but not all. In some ways, humans interacting over (e.g.) a computer are faring better.
This is what a "good economy" looks like. Parents who work long hours so they can afford to rent some great apartment and buy stuff for their family. They outsource a lot of the childcare to professional nannies or whoever. They outsource a lot of the elder care to nursing homes etc. People are getting married later in life so they can focus on their career. Individualism, kids moving out early, trying to impress each other with great apartments etc.
We are materially richer, but what about the social connections?
Similarly with technology. Take birthdays, for example. On their birthday people used to get personal phone calls, possibly emails. Then facebook made it easy to just write "happy birthday" on someone's wall, and see who else wrote it. Then, to increase "engagement" (or the appearance thereof), they let you write a quick note right where the birthday reminder appeared, on the right-hand pane. Now you couldn't even see what others wrote, and sometimes would breeze through, personalizing the greetings slightly "Happy birthday girl! Older and sexier they say."
Now, people are complaining that they have to get through so many birthday wishes on their wall and write a semi-personalized "thanks" response to each one. So the remaining step is to make an app to automate this. So the end result is we'll have nearly automatic sending and nearly automatic thanking, basically robots talking to robots, while the whole experience of birthday wishes is automated away from humans.