This is an edited version of a blog post I originally wrote back in 2008. Since then, I have seen no reason to doubt the correctness of my analysis, and in fact a suggestion by a reader has led me to consider additional, related questions. As I ruminate and prepare, I offer back up this first post regarding the communications media, isolation, and modern society.
One of the most aggravating things about the Internet is that it is bursting with stuff. Lots of stuff - memes, blogs, companies, charities, games, forums...you get the point. There's so much that, as useful as it is, it can get distracting. It can suck you in, alluring in the wealth of information to be absorbed; or with the wealth of mental junk food to sap your energy. As a personal example: over the course of a week a few years back, I decided to read basically everything that Wikipedia had on string theory, quantum physics, and post-original-trilogy Star Wars novels. Yeah, I know - random. What can I say? I'm a geek and a nerd. This should not surprise you by now.
Another time, right after I made the poor economic decision to spend money to go see Superman Returns I decided to read up on canonical Superman comics and their lore. That led into absorbing information about most of the major players in the DC Comics universe - and then, the Marvel Comics universe...I was up late those nights, but it was fun. Pretty useless from a meaning-of-life perspective, but, again, I am a geek and a nerd, and none of this should be in the least surprising to any of you. Not that I wouldn't agree that there was probably something better to spend my time on.
I just can't be too down on the Internet. Without it I wouldn't have this blog and all of its adoring reader. I wouldn't have nearly as easy of a time finding things to write about, let alone sharing them once they were written. However, to be fair, I have to admit that there is a downside: the more time you spend online, the less time you spend in the "real" world - and while blogging, surfing, and message boards (not to mention the more arcane implements, such as Usenet and IRC) are diverting, fun, and enjoyable, they're no substitute for a life. If you try to make the substitution, then it will fail. You won't get outside, you won't feel the fresh air - which even at the relatively chilly temperatures of this time of year, I still value beyond all the cubic feet of indoor air I breath most of the week. There's a reason that geeks and nerds are stereotypically white and skinny (though some would use the word "atrophied").
Back in the olden days, when there wasn't even a crappy substitute for reality, people were simply shut-ins, misanthropes, or Henry David Thoreau. They found ways for good or ill to shut themselves off from society and spend all their time with themselves and whatever cats, snow globes, or stupid pond-front houses they chose in involve in their solitary existences. I point you to a little piece a bit more explicitly about this if you're interested in what I've been trying to convey.
In the grand scheme of things, I look at this tendency to treat the Internet as a habitat or a shelter to be yet another symptom of societal atomization. As the range of our individual interests collapse further and further in, we are less and less interested in the people we can see, hear, and physically interact with, mainly because sensual presence has a way of making it hard to objectify people. That's what makes abortion such an easy atrocity to live with - you don't see carnage. You don't see babies, or for the most part even the chopped up bits of baby that are the result of the "procedure." Everything is tucked away nicely out of sight. Of course, such raw objectification leads to things like this being more and more commonplace. Objectification makes everything easier to deal with: rape, murder, and theft - everything. After all, do you weep if you break a hammer? Not a bit, because that would be silly - you just go out and buy a new hammer.
But what creates the atomization? Deep down, I think it's caused by a sort of "societal law of thermodynamics"; like energy and matter, societies and people lose steam and break apart over time. Tocqueville would say that it's a consequence of a society losing its mores - those ethereal, necessary things that define, shape, and sustain our existence in communion with each other. They give everyone something to aim at that is more exalted than themselves. They are ideals that draw men out of their private caves of self-interest and into the light of a society aimed toward a common good.
Of course, once the mores are lost, the clock starts ticking. Sure, society might continue to limp along for some amount of time on the strength of its members' awareness that cooperation is dictated by mutual self-interest (the idea that each member of a group can be better off in the group than by themselves) but self-interest is also lazy, and will look for the easiest way to get what it wants. Like anything with animal urges, the human being as a specimen wants to get along with the least amount of pain possible, be it physical, mental, or social. Living in a society is great and all, but there are so many annoying people in it - they don't like the things that we like, they don't listen to the same music that we do, and they smell funny. So, we cut the real-world social interaction to a minimum, dealing with people only when it is in our interest to do so. And we try to seek out friendship over the Internet by associating with people of common interests, musical tastes, and olfactory preferences.
The problem is that those people don't really exist. Not in the real world, at any rate. They're at so much of a distance that they may as well not even be human, even. Talking to an avatar in Second Life, or some guy on a forum somewhere, you have no meaningful concept of the person you're interacting with. You see exactly what they show you, and no more - but without the delightful unpredictability of real-world interactions, which are able to serve up surprises even after years of common intercourse. You take that away, and you're just chaining yourself to the wall of a cave, talking yourself into believing that the shadows on the wall are the real deal, rather than phantasms. Of course, your unconscious mind isn't fooled, and all that you really accomplish is reinforcing a worldview in which you are the sole occupant with the sort of dignity and importance that come with being...well, real.
I could terrify you with logical conclusions, doomsday scenarios, and assorted whatnot, but instead I'm going to give you a reading assignment that encapsulates the end-game of atomization very nicely. The Naked Sun is a fantastic novel by Isaac Asimov that is set in a society - the planet Solaria - where there is a meaningful semantic distinction between "seeing" and "viewing," and physical interaction of any kind is so distasteful that far in the future they make themselves hermaphroditic just so that they can avoid the disgusting trauma of coitus. As with a lot of science fiction, it sets its story a bit too optimistically in the far future, though, I think. Asimov's Solaria lives in the minds of everyone who uses the Internet as a gauge of worth - every blogger counting hits, every denizen of MySpace or Facebook who feels good or bad based upon how many people have "friended" them, every gamer who would rather kick back and run some multiplayer Halo session rather than leave the basement and make real, meaningful relationships happen.
This syndrome of retreating from reality and hiding on the Internet, the first step on a journey to Solaria incarnated, is yet another toll of the bell mourning the slow death of this latest iteration of refined barbarism. I think I'll go make me some in-the-flesh friends before it's too late.
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