Really interesting article and approach. It shouldn’t even be radical, but he we are. All the clichés about being more online but less connected are turning out to be true.
I strongly doubt there would be as much anger over the genocide in Palestine if we weren’t connected through the internet to Palestinians on the ground. We’re better connected to people across the world than ever before.
Also, my great grandparents warned my mom not to hang out with people from the town 10km away because they were violent thugs. My dad’s class at a Protestant high school had street fights with a class from a Catholic high school. Being offline and connected strongly with just your direct environment is a recipe for xenophobia over small differences.
So I don’t think the internet is the problem here.
True, but also many of us have lost connection with our direct neighbours. The recipe above doesn’t seek a return to the bigotry of yesterday. Let’s take the best of both worlds instead. The problem with an internet only approach to organizing is, we can shout in here angrily all day and it won’t change a thing. Changing stuff outside will include the need to at least get to know our neighbours and talk to them, and many people seem to have lost that ability. It’s not just the internet, it started with the TV in every home, so several generations of humans have forgotten how to interact with others.
I don’t know how much I agree with this. While the rise of television and the internet does correlate with the timeline of community decline, and an argument can be made that they’re the modern equivalent to the circus part of “bread and circuses”, I think that it’s just part of a larger pattern of breaking down community. I think the primary facilitator of losing our connection is financial and housing insecurity.
You used to be able to have a Superbowl Sunday gathering, or season finale parties, where everybody would sit around the television, eat, drink, and be merry, but nobody’s got the time or money for that any more. All my friends have moved away due to the cost of living, and most people I meet are on short or yearly leases and will be moving soon. It’s hard to connect with your neighbor when it’s a new stranger every year.
I guess you are right. My great-grandparents were already having to do this, some had to emigrate temporarily, others went for the promises of industrialisation. Every emigration means that culture, skills, knowledge of the land and knowing one’s neighbours are lost and have to be rebuilt, and this has been going on for generations (and happened already in antiquity). So yes, this is earlier than our addiction to screens. The screen addiction just finishes off what emigration has started. We now exist in a state where we don’t even want to get to know our neighbour because our interactions in online communities feel safer and we have forgotten how real life interaction works. However, we now have internet culture, something that didn’t exist before - so it’s not unlikely that two strangers can relate over the same thing, where they were limited by their local cultures before and might have found each other’s concerns puzzling.
We now exist in a state where we don’t even want to get to know our neighbour
I understand your overall sentiment, but this specifically is what I disagree with. There are people who dislike socialization, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re in the majority. Sure, people might be unpracticed with it, but that doesn’t mean the desire is gone.
I feel like it’s more accurate to say that people don’t want to have shallow unfulfilling relationships with our neighbors, and the current situation is preventing us from forming the sort of deep connections we desire.
Regarding screen addiction, I think it follows roughly the same behavioral patterns as any other addiction. It always starts with attempting to address an unfulfilled need. People seeking social connections, and having that be denied offline, are going to move online for that connection. I don’t think we’d have the same problem with parasocial relationships if we didn’t want friends so desperately that we’re willing to believe in a fiction. Same with brainrot, if we had easy access to quality entertainment, and the time to actually unwind and enjoy it, I don’t think brainrot would even exist in the first place.
