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The future of loneliness

theguardian.com

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Re: The future of loneliness

#51

Post by toothbrush »

So, slightly off-topic, but serious question: I don't use FB on principle (tracking, walled garden, evil in various ways), but I also don't know how to convince my "normal" friends to communicate in other ways... Does anyone have suggestions to avoid falling out of contact with faraway people? I emigrate every now and then, and I have yet to maintain connections after having left another city. It's rather frustrating, but is something as evil as FB or Skype or Google+ really the only way to approach this problem?

EDIT: I've re-activated my Diaspora account, but obviously no "normals" are to be found there ;) Perhaps I should start campaigning.

Re: The future of loneliness

#52

Post by ht_th »

cubano wrote: post #6

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 be…

Although I do agree that is has become harder to start anew without your past catching up with you, in my experience of growing up in a small community, if you did something bad or just had a bad name, people would learn about it two towns over when you would start dating someone there, or trying to get a job, or moving there. The "social network" might seem all revolutionary, but what has changed most is the scale of the network, both in nodes, geographical spread, and memory, not the social aspect as such.

However, where we could escape the confines of the small-town community by moving to the city or even further away, nowadays even moving to the other side of the world isn't going to help much any more unless you find someplace off the grid. It is something to worry about.

Maybe changing your name might work, though, as long as Internet search engines aren't smart enough to connect your new name to your old one that's plastered all over the Internet.

Re: The future of loneliness

#53

Post by jokoon »

I wish the internet would be a place where you could organize the co-renting of large apartments to counteract this lonely society.

Also, facebook is not the place where you really can discover the people who live around you, by advertising your skills, interests and potential deals you could have with neighbors. One way to have enough privacy for this, would be to limit the distance or amount of people you can see near you.

I don't really see that much success in social networking app when dealing with localization...

Re: The future of loneliness

#54

Post by hydrafog »

I can not remotely fathom the use of twitter or even facebook. I have accounts with both even wrote a facebook app but posted maybe a dozen things total and haven't touched either in years. It is utterly unimaginable to me to upload photos of myself at random or post random statements. I haven't a clue how this is keeping in touch.

Likewise the notion that one is in continuous contact with others is also totally alien. I own a couple generations of iphones and androids, wrote some apps for them but otherwise leave them in a drawer. They're there right now batteries dead.

I do not know what percentage of people also think this way, twitter seems to have low penetration but facebook enormous. One thing though is that such people are not posting on the web and so would be under represented.

Re: The future of loneliness

#55

Post by anigbrowl »

obstinate wrote: post #46
anigbrowl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't. I think it's well-correlated, but that correlation varies and people's estimation of it is likely subject to a severe Dunning-Kruger effect - most people likely consider themselves to be above-average judges of character. Now, as for causality, the more social and economic opportunities you withhold from ex-felons - never allowing them to vote, continually expanding the scope declaration requirements, et…

It may be fundamental attribution error. Has that been conclusively demonstrated in this particular case? If so, what proportion of the propensity to commit crime is based on circumstances? Presumably not 100%, considering psychopaths exist and are quite difficult to rehabilitate. As far as I'm aware, there's not any conclusive data to show that rehabilitative approaches are much better for recidivism. I'm in favor o…

Well, time to update your priors. There's a lot of good evidence about the impact of different strategies on recidivism rates. Here's a fairly recent comprehensive overview: http://static.nicic.gov/Library/023358.pdf

Ah, downvotes for supplying actual research, gotta love it.

Re: The future of loneliness

#56

Post by monort »

brational wrote: post #8
dman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me part of what makes the interactions subpar now is that one or more parties is participating via mobile devices and input on mobile is borked. I am overly eager to be brief since typing on the mobile is so painful. This makes it difficult to have nuanced conversations.

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.

Can you just send speech directly in this situation, without converting to text? There are apps, that allow asynchronous speech messages.

Re: The future of loneliness

#57

Post by IkmoIkmo »

rayiner wrote: post #5
tokenadult wrote: post #4

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 respo…

I am torn. On one hand, social media has absolutely brought me closer to my family. My family is scattered between Bangladesh, Australia, Canada, and Germany, while my wife's is in Oregon and Washington. Nobody is close to where we live in D.C. But they can all watch my daughter grow up on Facebook. On the other hand, it's hard to have deep relationships over social media. Tweeting and like-ing are pretty superficial…

Did the AIM convos happen when you were a teenager? My FB chat's aren't like my MSN days, but it's the difference between my teen years and my mid twenties (today), not a difference in tech. I still chat my ass off with good friends on FB, very similar to my MSN days.

Meanwhile I haven't put anything on my wall since 2012. I literally use FB messenger to just send my best friends any stories or pictures I want to share with them. The other 250... they're more like colleagues to me than part of an intimate circle. Which is why my wall is so empty.

How everyone else does it (posting general stuff on their wall) is beyond me, I feel like an alien. For example someone I hung out with in Korea just posted: "Colorado we about to be all up inside of u".

He's probably going to take a trip to Colorado. Why he wants to share that with his 1800 friends is beyond me. That's the type of stuff I'd send a few of my friends, it's just not relevant to anyone else. Didn't even spark a conversation or anything either. I'd feel like a giant asshole posting stuff like that every day. HN is a world of difference, it's literally the reason I'm on here.

Twitter is a mixed-bag for me. Thing is I don't follow friends or semi-friends on twitter. Mostly just industry/professional/journalists I want to stay up to date on. So it's usually a feed of highly relevant bits of information, so I quite like twitter. The other side of twitter (people who tweet with their friends) feels like teenage MSN chats, only less coherent, less conversational, more one-liner, and of course, permanent so I stay away from that.

I mean imagine you're in a bar or on a bus with your friends just talking about whatever, and you gave everyone in the bar or on the bus a little device with which they can read every single line of the conversation you're having. I'd be the weirdest thing in the world, extremely awkward, there'd be no privacy and it'd be completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. But somehow some people use twitter like that, posting public permanent random conversations that you'd normally (in the real world) expect to have privately, instead of using PMs or Private Group Chat.

That extends to things like 'liking'. If I like a new book, I want to share that with my brother who reads a lot. I really don't care for a guy I had class with last year to see that. Say you're in a store and you see a nice shirt, would anyone send a letter to 250 of his friends about that? But some people treat FB likes like that. It's really weird to me. Also one of those things I'll PM a few of my friends.

Re: The future of loneliness

#58

Post by rambambam »

KFW504 wrote: post #36

"Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure." We are all walking the line of putting ourselves out there enough in a meaningful, authentic way to feel an organic connection while also combating a fear (that of course varies with the individual) of vulnerability. The internet provides a litt…

Well spoken. Just perfect.

Re: The future of loneliness

#59

Post by chippy »

toothbrush wrote: post #51

So, slightly off-topic, but serious question: I don't use FB on principle (tracking, walled garden, evil in various ways), but I also don't know how to convince my "normal" friends to communicate in other ways... Does anyone have suggestions to avoid falling out of contact with faraway people? I emigrate every now and then, and I have yet to maintain connections after having left another city. It's rather frustrating…

seems like your options, given your preferences, and the realisation that you cannot force others to communicate via other ways, are the:

telephone and postal service.

Re: The future of loneliness

#60

Post by toothbrush »

chippy wrote: post #59
toothbrush wrote: post #51

So, slightly off-topic, but serious question: I don't use FB on principle (tracking, walled garden, evil in various ways), but I also don't know how to convince my "normal" friends to communicate in other ways... Does anyone have suggestions to avoid falling out of contact with faraway people? I emigrate every now and then, and I have yet to maintain connections after having left another city. It's rather frustrating…

seems like your options, given your preferences, and the realisation that you cannot force others to communicate via other ways, are the: telephone and postal service.

Fair enough. I also use email (mostly in fact), full well knowing that even if I don't directly use Google mail, they still have everything... All in all a very unsatisfactory situation.
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