Jim Geraghty: If You Were Going to Build a World That Creates and Enhances Depression & Anger, Wouldn't It Look A Lot Like Our Current World?

I'm always down with some anti-Internet neo-Luddism.

This is from last week, in the wake of Robin Williams' suicide, but I missed it.

Our ability to take just about any event and turn it into an online argument is one of our modern society’s mentally unhealthy habits. In fact, if we wanted to build a culture that deliberately cultivated feelings of depression, isolation, anger, and despair, how different would it look from the one we have now?

The first key aspect of this perfect depressive dystopia would be to get as many people as possible interacting with screens, instead of with flesh-and-blood human beings, as often as possible. (Pause for the irony that you’re almost certainly reading this on a screen.) Prevalent aspects of human contact from the dawn of human civilization -- eye contact, tone of voice, volume of voice, sarcasm and inflection, posture, body language -- would be removed from the increasingly common forms of communication, and everyone would spend as much time as possible interpreting the true meaning of hieroglyphics that are supposed to resemble human faces. Miscommunications, perceived insults, and fights would grow apace.

This depressive world would remove the tactile sensation of human touch, expressed in a romantic and sexual sense but also in the gestures of a handshake, a hand on the shoulder, a hug, a pat on the back. Entire friendships would begin and end online, with the individuals never interacting in person.

The constantly online life would undoubtedly come at the expense of the offline life. People would interact with their neighbors less. There would be fewer shared social experiences -- the social phenomenon of Bowling Alone on steroids. The offline world would seem more full of strangers, more suspicious, more potentially dangerous, full of vivid, widely covered stories of violence and wrongdoing reminding us to not trust each other.

The constant online presence would lead to a world of nonstop instant reaction, where everyone could immediately transmit the first thought that popped into his head in response to news. Everyone's first reaction would become his defining reaction, particularly if it's dumb or knee-jerk. If it was racist, sexist, hateful, or obnoxious, even better. Those horrified would then share and retweet it to their friends and followers, spreading the perception that the world was overpopulated with hateful idiots, and that average Americans -- or average human beings! -- were rather nasty, ignorant creatures unworthy of respect or affection....

The widespread perception that almost everyone else was a moron -- why, just look at the things people post and say on the Internet! -- would facilitate a certain philosophy of narcissism; we would have people walking around convinced they're much smarter, and much more sophisticated and enlightened, than everyone else.

I think this is why I've been in revolt against default internet culture for a while now.

Yes, people may point out that the Internet was originally kind of a place to be a dick and, as one commenter said today, "let vent your demons."

However, for many of us -- people like me, who spend most of every day in this culture, and maybe some people like you -- the Internet really isn't a place to escape, it's where we actually live (as horrifying an admission as that may be).

And, therefore, those of us who are -- admittedly -- spending way too much time online for one reason or another are beginning to miss the agreeable aspects of polite society -- saying nice things, agreeing with people, conceding points even in an argument with someone whose main point you dispute, and general sociability -- which are frequently absent from online interaction.

I said this on twitter last night when I was thinking about this: It may be that I am more sensitive to this sort of thing than the average internet user, because while the average internet user is only submerged in this strange online world a couple of blow-off hours a day, I'm here all day. I work here.

Sometimes I forget my imperative to Disconnect and then I play here after having worked here all day.

So, I can see where I might be over-sensitive to this. Being immersed in this stuff 10-14 hours per day (on long days, anyway) will make one more sensitive, and perhaps oversensitive, to the generally disagreeable and negative ethos that tends to prevail on the internet.

And someone only immersed in it for one or two hours might say: "So what? Sure it's there. But man up, Sally. It's nothing to cry about."

And I can't dispute such an argument, because that hypothetical disputant would be coming from a different experience than I am.

Sure, I guess, being immersed in a culture of frequent negativity and hostility isn't that bad if you're only in it a couple of hours a day.*

Still, if this Internet thing is here to stay, I do think it could stand to benefit from the importation of general rules of pleasant and polite social interaction which have evolved over the course of 100,000 years of human history in real-life interaction.

Those rules didn't evolve out of nowhere. They didn't evolve randomly. They didn't evolve pointlessly.

They evolved to keep a lid on social discord, and to keep people in a generally happy frame of mind.

As with Chesterton's Fence: I guess I'd have to ask why some would tear the fence down without first inquiring why the fence had been built in the first place.

* A long time ago I went out to the woods with a friend. This friend brought along his friends.

These guys' idea of male interaction was nothing but chops-busting and attacks over everything. Beyond the constant attacks -- which are of course a primate method of competition -- were the actual competitions.

Over everything. There was not a single thing you could do without being challenged in competition.

Drinking especially. If you were only on your sixth beer by 3pm, well, that pretty much sealed the case that you were a homosexual, and perhaps should relocate to the back room to service the Real Men at the cabin, as their needs might require.

So that was like more than 48 hours straight of that. Just insults, and competition, and deranged insistence that everyone attempt to cultivate a jaunty level of hardcore alcoholism.

Now, I've been in chops-busting situations, but never for that long a time, and never in such a sustained, we're gonna break you, Son sort of way.

After I got home, a friend asked me how it was.

I told her it was maybe the most singularly unpleasant two days I'd ever spent in my entire life, and that my nerves were still jangly from the constant flinching from attacks, both delivered and merely anticipated.

Anyway, I never went out with my friend to the woods again. Once was enough.

posted by Ace at 05:44 PM

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