The future of loneliness

> My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed.

Social groups, cultures, parents and children, friends. All of these concepts rely on the concept of a connection between solid selves, that allow for the passage of data/information from self to self. The resulting construction is called a culture, a social group, a relationship. It only exists because there exists other conceptual constructs that serve as comparative references.

> Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control.

People's memories and imaginations, these are subject to play and replay, and can result in both (il)logical and (ir)rational inference, independently or socially established. These have been philosophical questions long before they became digital.

I feel fundamentally different from this author about what the Internet is doing to my interpersonal relationships, but she makes some good points. I like Facebook very well because, duh, my friends are there. I have lived overseas back in the era when I couldn't possibly afford regular international telephone calls, and relying on aerograms (remember those?)[1] to communicate by postal mail meant a rather slow response time to anything I said to old friends back home.

After living overseas twice in my life (two separate three-year stays), I now live in the same metropolitan community where I grew up, as the author didn't when she had the experiences that shaped her opinion. ("My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends.") Some of the people I interact with online have known me since almost fifty (!) years ago, a few of them continually over all that while. Those friends who are still in this town I see in person once in a while, but I hear a lot more of their news in between face-meeting through online communication.

Because I've lived in more than one country, and some of my classmates and colleagues and one child have scattered hither and yon, there isn't anywhere on the planet where I can face-meet with all the people I like at the same time, but my second stay overseas (1998-2001) illustrated the power of the Internet to reduce feelings of loneliness and lack of connection while far away from most familiar friends, and helped me learn how to use online networks to enhance real-world friendships. These days, Facebook comes pretty close to being with all my friends all the time, and I like that. I come here on Hacker News, of course, pretty often, and here I can sometimes make a new kind of friend over shared interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogram

In a world of selfies and shared profiles, how can someone whom has painful memories of seeing themselves in photos ever since childhood supposed to join the party?

How can someone who suffers from a pretty serious criminal record ever feel comfortable meeting new potential partners who will almost surely run a background check and discover unsavory things that really cannot be explained away?

I ask these question because I live them every day.

Self-esteem and confidence about your looks is the elephant-in-the-room here. I often feel Social is like welfare for the rich.

The people whom benefit the most are perhaps the same ones whom need it the least.

I think you hit the nail on the head. My two best college friends and I are all separated now but keep almost daily intellectual communication via gchat. I have to use my phone tho as I work for R&D for a big corp and chat is blocked.

It's aggravating. But then later when I can continue a conversation via keyboard the depth and intimacy is much greater.

Maybe as speech to text improves it'll get better.

Lol...you are obviously not over the age of 40.