My fears of Digital Technology Socially Isolating Us

I'm majoring in IT so I'm learning all kinds of things about computers from how they work to how they network, store data transport data, and backup data. I was always wondering how they kept track of people's credit ratings, financial information, investments, property, criminal background checks, before computers? Did they have all this information filed on paper documents in file cabinets? How were they able to find people's credit rating and adjust their investments and stocks so quickly? People had to get phone calls from landline telephones and then walk to file cabinets and mail things. Phone and mail was the only way to communicate. It could take months for identity theft to be detected and for information to be sent out. I just don't see how we were able to make it all work before computers?

I feel like our world is becoming more and more integrated online is not healthy for us. We should have a variety of ways we communicate with people not just digitally. Every year I find myself spending more and more time on the computer to the point where I am sitting at one as much as possible. For one thing, it has replaced a lot of things we used to do other ways. We used to mail more and drive around more to meet people in person to communicate. Now we communicate with them online. The internet has simplified our lives but at the same time I feel like it has separated us from more important things in life. I can't quite explain what it is, but something just doesn't feel right. Somebody want to help me out with what I'm feeling?

It feels like we are creating a generation that grows up communicating with people through images/videos and text instead of physically in person. You don't find that girl that likes you by texting her on facebook twitter or you phone. You don't meet that girl in the library google searching. You don't get that good feeling of hanging out with good friends by texting them. You can have a little of that feeling online, but it isn't the same as the real thing. I fear we are creating a society of socially awkward and isolated people that resort to digital communication for everything just because it is easier. Even when we are in public we are so busy texting and/or listening to our MP3 players and other digital devices that the people we are surrounded by in public are pretty much irrelevant to us in public too. I'm guilty of this myself, but in a way I feel like I'm forced into this lifestyle of digital communication cause physical social isolation because everyone else does it and nobody seems to show any interest in their surrounding people anyways.

It's an interesting little post there GB.

Like most things the danger comes from over reliance on one source of information and not being savvy to to the local parlance employed at the information well one is using.

In the past most people got there news from a professional broadcaster (usually with lobbying groups influencing a not always open editorial stance). They got most of their information from a very small library of books and had a very small network of connections (usually closed to the locality where they lived and/or worked).

The people on here are from all over the world, most of them have never physically met so the sorts of interactions on display here would not be possible only a few decades ago and some of things being created from those discussions could not have been created just a few years ago.

That's a positive thing but without a degree of moderation and awareness of the large degree of artifice involved there is a danger of individuals either forgetting that they are addressing a human being or becoming so addicted to the unfolding narrative that events within it are taken far too seriously.

Technology provides tools, which can sometimes allow us to do new things but usually just allow us to extend our reach while doing the things we would have done if those tools were not available.

So it can allow a creative person to be more creative, a jovial prankster to make more people giggle and for a lonely person to become even more lost in a much larger and diverse crowd.

Is there actually any measurably decrease in person-person interaction in the real world? Or is it simply a new layer of digital communication layered over it?

I work at a high school. The kids see as much of people as they always seem to have. They still get together on weekends, after school. They're just always ALSO interacting via the netweb with texts and stuff.

Yeah there are lonely people who spend too much time online, but I dont think that, if the net didn't exist, all of them would suddenly be social butterflies (not denying that the net might be an enabling factor to such things though). Yeah I play "Civilization IV" with pals online, but given our busy lives if we didn't play online the alternative was not playing at all.

Perhaps in the long run Digital Social Networking and crap will have more visible effects on first world societies, but now I don't think it's made much of a REAL effect on the simple ammount of people-on-people contact.

I for one wish my friends and family down south would use the internet more because I only get to see them a couple of times a year and if they were on the web I could see and talk to them with more ease.

The telephone can be quite pricey if I phone at the wrong time and with some of them I'm never sure when to phone because they have odd shift jobs and/or young children so there you have an example of the lack of digital technology closing off avenues of social interaction.

If it wasn't for this webzone I wouldn't be meeting xhonzi in a few months.

No, it's true.  This webzone gets the credit.

EyeShotFirst said:

I have friends, but they are rarely around. You guys are always here LOL.

We have always been here.