201–210 of 342 posts
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Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.
I want to upvote this 10x.
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Every generation would always talk about the destructive increase in entertainment in their time. My grandfather said his parents told him he listened to the radio too much when he was a kid.
Your great-grandparents were right, it's just hard to imagine listening to radio with family being "destructive", when today people have less friends than ever and are literally choosing Netflix, video games, and pornography over having a social life.
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> I'm a woman. This is an overwhelmingly male space. No one here can physically assault me the way they could in meatspace. And yet women managed to exist in outside society and participate in all kinds of actions in the 60s and 70s for example (including protests, acid tests, trips to India, and all kinds of stuff), under much worse conditions (re: average societal sexism, etc), without all today's drama. It's like…
The many articles I've seen in recent years related to the #MeToo movement and similar suggest to me that women are pretty routinely sexually assaulted for simply attending a rather wide variety of events, including simply having a job. (Keep in mind that doesn't mean raped -- it includes more minor offenses, like being felt up.) I was sexually assaulted as a child. I don't think I have been as an adult. I like keepi…
The reason I'm no longer convinced is that such simplification carries with it a component of convenience that makes it awfully easy to isolate ourselves from those who may differ from our thinking and outlook and it seems to be human nature, backed by an awful lot of history, that we prefer to avoid such inconveniences in favor of reinforcing our preferences.
The problem with avoiding the inconvenience of being exposed to different thinking is two-fold: isolation bubbles that allow us to come to beliefs absent any real opposition which leads to intellectually weak conclusions and an exposure to the overwhelming commonality that most people have with each other absent a few contentious beliefs/ideas. The lack of recognition of such commonality allows "othering" based on minor differences in a way that simply did not exist in most Western societies of the last few hundred years.
It may indeed be what we wanted but I'm unconvinced it resulted in what we need.
This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…
I think the lack of strong social ties was also the norm through most of the 20th century (in the US at least) but people didn't have the opportunity to connect with focused interest groups as they do now. Prior to that social ties were enforced through religion and that created it's own problems.
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Hello fellow LGBT person! We actually have it a lot better than many marginalized groups -- if you want community, you can find it. You just have to put yourself out there in an offline sense and disabuse yourself of any ideas that you are somehow better than anyone else in the community. Go on a bunch of coffee dates and you'll make plenty of friends. It's not organized per se, but in many cities the queer people al…
I appreciate your comment, but my experience has sadly been the opposite of what you describe. Perhaps I've just been unlucky, or maybe I just come off as an asshole, but people in Bay Area LGBT circles have been quicker to find disagreement and ghost me from their lives than any other group of people I've ever met. After the third or fourth time losing what I thought was a close friend over what felt like a petty di…
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Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.
And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free. Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs." I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to t…
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And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free. Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs." I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to t…
Free but monetized.
I'm very much okay with this.
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This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .
People replace God with something else I have noticed. Many of the Atheists in the Atheists community in the United States started a new organisation called Atheism+, which alienated a lot of group and those in Atheism+ started added a lot of dogma, which I find as someone who observed the split from the outside in the UK to be somewhat ironic. I am not religious myself (but I am slowly having a greater appreciation…
I've already retreated to mostly cozyweb! It's great here.
I started building a new cozyweb community. To join, users need a valid phone number. I hope that this will dramatically decrease spam and beefy interaction. I don't expect the community to be huge, but I'd rather have it cozy and small than huge and chaotic.
I'd cultivated a surprisingly good, small (~40-50) member community on G+ at one point, largely on that basis.
Mutual anonymity (myself as founder and moderator) worked. It wasn't conflict-free, but conflict resolved, quickly. Most often problems removed themselves, rarely (2-3x?) they had to be removed. That was done as quietly and civily as possibly.
This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…
I wholeheartedly agree but also don't know how to fill those gaps. I'd love a church-like institution. I think about going to church almost every sunday just to experience being together with people in that way. I remember it fondly from being a child even though I no longer believe in it.