Alone in a Crowd
You may have all read the mainstream media blip two years back about an extensive thread on a message board simply called “i am lonely will anyone speak to me.” In fact, over three years after it’s creation, you can still read the thousands and thousands of responses to one person’s plea for a human connection. The stark reality is that three years ago, many of the most active citizens of the internet were technologically minded, shy individuals. So, from this preponderance of socially awkward people, there was bound to come a post like this, with a corresponding outpouring of responses. Naturally, as the demographics of the internet have evolved, the responses have also diversified. However, the central point remains: the cold online world still feels lonely to many people. A 2004 article in the New Yorker, called, “Hello, Loneliness” put forth a good summary:
Visitors from around the world logged on with personal expressions of solitude, ranging from the adolescent (“Spring break really fucking sucks”) and the temporary (“My wife is gone for the night”) to the involved (“I’m in the final year of my Ph.D., I have no life, and I am broken up with my gf because she joined a cult”), the confused (“I typed: ‘why is abc bittorrent not working’ and I got ‘I am lonely.’ Not too hilarious”), and the existential (“I feel like a floating piece of dust in outer space”).
The only thing I disagree with in that quote is that “visitors from around the world” are still logging on with their own thoughts to add. After all, the most recent post on this loneliness thread was yesterday. The interesting thing to note here, is that one of the largest trends in the online world is directly related to this loneliness post: Facebook, MySpace, Virb, etc. are the internet’s response. That is, when somebody thinks “I am lonely,” they type in a social networking address and hit the enter key, hoping for a human feeling of connection to the world around them. That’s not to say that people always visit for this reason, but the desire to feel interconnected with a community is undeniably a central reason for the growth of social networks.
The concept of connectivity is going in new directions, too. For example, there’s Twittervision, which shows you a map of the world, and updates live as people microblog their lives. Updates ranges from:
“jen - i made a cafepress sale - but it was Bingo related - so it wasn’t a penguin”
- billykay
to:
“Sometimes it is good to spend some time doing nothing at all”
- betobeto
You can just sit there and stare at the monitor, watching people’s lives (worldwide) flow by in real time. Could this make a person feel any less lonely? I don’t know. Could a message board make the original poster 3+ years ago feel less lonely? Hard to say. It is undeniable, however, that each new disruptive technology (automobiles, the internet, personal computers, digital photography, telephones, etc.) impact our social fabric in ways we can not predict.